The Connecticut Appellate Court concluded that a child’s uninsured medical expenses were not “unreimbursed” for purposes of a child support order where someone other than a parent paid them. In Schull v. Schull, the parties were under court orders to share equally all of their minor children’s unreimbursed medical expenses. Their son had an eye disorder. Plaintiff wanted him to have an experimental surgery that was not covered by her insurance, at a cost of nearly $56,000. Defendant was concerned over the surgery’s experimental nature and cost. Plaintiff said her father would pay for it as a gift to the son.
The son had the surgery when he was 17. Plaintiff’s father paid for it in full. Plaintiff never asked defendant to pay anything.
After the son graduated from high school and turned 18, defendant moved to terminate child support. Plaintiff did not contest termination and did not claim any arrearage.
Nearly a year later, plaintiff filed a motion for contempt, claiming that defendant filed to comply with the court’s orders that he pay 50% of the son’s unreimbursed medical expenses. She claimed that the money from her father was a loan to her, not a gift to the son. The trial court found her testimony “dubious” and noted that plaintiff did not present any evidence of a loan or that she was paying it back. The court gave her two months to submit that evidence. If she met that condition, defendant would be obliged to pay $25 per month towards his putative $28,000 obligation.
I’m going to pause the factual recitation here. Think of it like an aside in a play. At $25 a month, it would take defendant more than 91 years to pay his share. Clearly, the judge was telling plaintiff to let it go. She didn’t.
Instead of submitting the evidence the judge requested, plaintiff filed a motion to reargue, which the court denied. She later filed a motion to open on the basis of fraud. She alleged that defendant had misrepresented his assets in his financial affidavit and could pay more than $25 per month. She still didn’t submit the evidence the court requested. By the time the court considered the motion to open, the evidence deadline had passed. Instead of denying it outright on that basis, the trial court found no probable cause to believe there was a fraud and denied the motion.
Plaintiff appealed. The Appellate Court affirmed.
Plaintiff’s Main Argument on Appeal
Plaintiff argued that the support orders unconditionally obligated defendant to pay 50% of the son’s unreimbursed medical expenses. Therefore, the trial court improperly conditioned defendant’s payment obligation on proof that plaintiff’s father had loaned plaintiff the money to pay for the surgery and she was paying it back.
Appellate Court Concludes Child’s Uninsured Medical Expenses were not “Unreimbursed”
The Appellate Court noted that the support orders did not define “unreimbursed medical expenses.” But the child support guideline regulations consider unreimbursed medical expenses to be those “not covered by insurance or reimbursed in any other manner” (my emphasis). Since plaintiff failed to prove that she was obliged to repay her father, the surgery expenses were not unreimbursed even though they weren’t reimbursed by insurance. They were reimbursed in another manner — namely by plaintiff’s father’s gift to the son.
The court concluded that defendant didn’t have any obligation to reimburse plaintiff. “To hold otherwise would give [plaintiff] a windfall; she would have no obligation to pay her 50 percent share of the medical expenses, and, at the same time, the defendant would be responsible to give to her his 50 percent share.”
Appellate Court Concludes Plaintiff’s Other Arguments were Moot
Plaintiff also argued that $25 a month was too small a payment and the trial court should have granted her motion to open the judgment on the basis of fraud.
The Appellate Court concluded these arguments were moot because plaintiff missed the deadline for submitting the “proof of loan” evidence (and in fact never submitted any). In other words, the size of the monthly payment and defendant’s ability to pay more were moot because plaintiff’s failure to submit the evidence meant defendant didn’t have to pay anything.
Other Things to Note
The Appellate Court observed that the trial court’s conditional order of payments, including plaintiff’s evidence deadline, was an order related to child support. Under Practice Book § 61-11(c), plaintiff’s motion to open did not automatically stay the conditional order, which means it did not stay plaintiff’s evidence deadline. So, while plaintiff’s motion to open did extend her time to appeal the order, it did not extend her time to comply with the order.
In footnote 2 of the opinion, the court noted that defendant did not file an appeal brief but his attorney asked to be heard at oral argument. The Appellate Court rejected the request because Practice Book § 70-4 says you can’t argue if you didn’t file a brief or join in someone else’s.
In footnote 12, the court cautioned that not every gift would be considered a reimbursement by other means. For example, “if the plaintiff had established that her father simply had given her a gift of $50,000, untethered to her son’s medical expenses, and that the plaintiff then chose to use those funds to pay the medical expenses, then that gift would not be considered a reimbursement of medical expenses.”
About the Photo
The son had an eye condition called aniridia, which is an absence of the iris. The American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus describes it in detail here.
There would be no change in child custody where the facts did not show a material change in circumstances. In 
A court cannot open a dissolution judgment absent fraud, the Connecticut Appellate Court re-confirmed in a January 25, 2016 advance release opinion. The court lacks subject matter jurisdiction to open the judgment without finding fraud, even if the parties agree to open it.