26 Jul 2020

Texas: Federal Airline Deregulation Act Does Not Preempt Texas Rules Regarding Air Ambulance Reimbursements

In an opinion at odds with several earlier decisions from federal district courts, a divided Supreme Court of Texas held the state's general standard of fair and reasonable reimbursement, as applied to air ambulance services provided to workers who sustain work-related injuries, was not preempted by the federal Airline Deregulation Act (ADA). Reversing a decision by the state's Court of Appeals, the majority of the high court stressed that the Texas system for reimbursing the ambulance service companies did not mandate any particular payment level. Moreover, the ambulance service company had failed to establish that the state's reimbursement practices had a "significant effect" on its prices for carrying injured customers by air.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Texas Mut. Ins. Co. v. PHI Air Medical, LLC, 2020 Tex. LEXIS 615 (June 26, 2020)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 94.03.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see