Those are different questions with different answers. Maintenance and cure is the employer's obligation under general maritime law to pay an injured seaman's basic living expenses and medical care until maximum medical improvement. When an employer withholds those benefits in willful and wanton disregard of that obligation, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that punitive damages may be available. Atlantic Sounding Co. v. Townsend, 557 U.S. 404, 424 (2009). But a late payment, a denial, or a cutoff does not, by itself, meet that standard.
The Young Firm represents injured seamen from New Orleans and across Louisiana and the Gulf Coast in maintenance-and-cure disputes, including claims that an employer's handling went beyond an ordinary disagreement. You do not have to decide whether what happened to you legally qualifies as bad faith before asking for a review. That determination is our job. Yours is to get the benefits you are owed and the treatment you need, and a review can address both at the same time.
For the foundational rules on what maintenance and cure covers and who is entitled to it, see the parent page on maintenance and cure rights and claims. This page focuses narrowly on the harder question: when nonpayment becomes culpable, and what that can mean for your recovery.
Does Every Denial or Late Payment Amount to Bad Faith?
No. A denied, delayed, or terminated maintenance-and-cure payment does not automatically establish bad faith, and it does not automatically entitle a seaman to punitive damages or attorney fees. It may establish that benefits are owed, which is a separate and often more immediate issue.
Keep three layers distinct:
- Whether benefits are owed at all. This depends on seaman status, an injury or illness that arose while in the service of the vessel, and the seaman not yet having reached maximum medical improvement. If you are unsure whether you qualify as a seaman, that threshold question is addressed on the page covering who qualifies as a seaman. Without seaman status there is no maintenance-and-cure obligation and therefore nothing to enforce in bad faith.
- Whether the employer's refusal was reasonable. An employer is entitled to investigate a claim and to raise genuine factual or legal disputes. A refusal that rests on a real, supported question is not bad faith even if a court later rules for the seaman.
- Whether the employer's conduct was culpable enough for additional remedies. Only this layer concerns compensatory damages caused by the nonpayment, attorney fees, or punitive damages, and each of those remedies has its own threshold.
"Bad faith" is a useful everyday description for the third layer, but it is not the legal test for any single remedy. Courts ask whether the refusal was unreasonable, whether it was callous and recalcitrant, or whether it showed willful and wanton disregard, depending on which remedy is at stake. Those phrases come from specific decisions, discussed below, and they are not interchangeable.
One more distinction matters for Louisiana readers. Maintenance and cure is a creature of general maritime law, not of Louisiana's insurance bad-faith statutes. The penalty provisions that apply to a homeowner's or auto insurer that drags its feet do not govern a vessel employer's maintenance-and-cure obligation. The analysis on this page is federal maritime law, applied in whatever forum your case ends up in.
If your only question is why payments stopped and how to get them reinstated, that is an ordinary denial dispute, and it should be pursued as one. The question of enhanced remedies is an addition to that dispute, not a substitute for it, and it can be evaluated alongside it rather than after it.
Reasonable Investigation, Unreasonable Refusal, and Potentially Willful Nonpayment
The Fifth Circuit has long described maintenance-and-cure liability as a graduated scale. In Morales v. Garijak, Inc., 829 F.2d 1355, 1358 (5th Cir. 1987), the court explained that an employer who reasonably denies a claim owes only the benefits themselves if it turns out to be wrong; an employer who unreasonably refuses becomes liable for the compensatory harm that the refusal causes; and an employer whose conduct is more egregious—callous and recalcitrant, arbitrary and capricious, or willful and persistent—exposes itself to attorney fees. Punitive damages, confirmed in Townsend, require willful and wanton disregard of the obligation. The culpability language in these decisions overlaps, and courts do not treat the remedies as rungs on a fixed ladder. Each remedy's requirement is stated in its own terms and measured against the full record.
What separates the tiers is not the outcome of the claim but the reason for withholding benefits and the response to the evidence the seaman provides. Two facts tend to matter most:
- What the employer knew, and when. Did it have the medical recommendation, the treating physician's opinion, the incident report? An employer that acts on incomplete information after asking for more is in a different position than one that had the records and did nothing with them.
- What the employer did with what it knew. Did it investigate, explain its position, and reconsider when new evidence arrived? Or did it stop paying, give shifting or no reasons, and maintain the refusal after receiving documentation that answered its stated concern?
Illustrations, not rules
The following are hypothetical illustrations to show how the same surface fact—a stopped payment—can sit at very different points on the scale. They are not descriptions of actual cases and are not legal conclusions. Every real dispute turns on its own record.
| Scenario | What the employer did | Where it may fall on the scale |
|---|---|---|
| Supported dispute | Seaman reports a back injury. Two examining physicians disagree about whether he has reached maximum medical improvement. Employer explains its position in writing, identifies the medical opinion it is relying on, and offers to reconsider on receipt of further records. | These are indicators of a genuine medical dispute handled in the open, which cuts against additional remedies. They do not settle the question. Conflicting opinions do not by themselves justify a cutoff—doubts about a seaman's entitlement are resolved in the seaman's favor, Vaughan v. Atkinson, 369 U.S. 527, 532 (1962)—so counsel would still examine whether the employer's chosen opinion was sound and whether it kept paying while the conflict was unresolved. |
| Unsupported handling | Seaman submits a treating physician's surgical recommendation. Employer stops paying without obtaining any contrary medical opinion, does not respond to two written requests for its reason, and reinstates only after suit is filed. | Facts like these invite scrutiny of whether the refusal was unreasonable and whether the delay caused compensable harm. Whether they reach the fee or punitive standards depends on the full record. |
| Potentially willful conduct | Employer terminates benefits citing a "preexisting condition," receives the seaman's complete prior medical history showing no such condition, acknowledges receipt, and continues refusing payment for months without further investigation or explanation. | Persistent refusal after the stated reason has been answered, with no investigation, is the kind of conduct courts examine under the callous-and-recalcitrant and willful-and-wanton standards. Still not an automatic finding. |
Two stated termination reasons that require careful evaluation
Two stated reasons counsel may need to evaluate are maximum medical improvement and alleged concealment of a preexisting condition. Neither is inherently a bad-faith reason, and neither is inherently a good one.
Maximum medical improvement. Maintenance and cure ends when the seaman reaches MMI—the point at which further treatment will not improve the condition. A termination backed by a physician's MMI opinion is not automatically culpable, but it is not automatically justified either, particularly where a treating physician is still recommending curative treatment. The employer does not get to pick the opinion it prefers and stop paying; how the conflict was handled, and whether genuine doubt was resolved in the seaman's favor, is part of the analysis. A termination that cites MMI with no medical support, or that ignores a treating physician's recommendation for curative treatment, raises sharper questions. The medical and legal details of MMI belong on the page covering maximum medical improvement and benefit duration; here, the point is that counsel must look at what medical basis the employer actually had when it invoked MMI and what it did when confronted with a contrary opinion.
Alleged concealment of a preexisting condition. Under the Fifth Circuit's McCorpen line of cases, an employer may defeat maintenance and cure if it proves the seaman intentionally concealed a material preexisting medical condition that is connected to the injury at issue. The defense has specific elements and the employer bears the burden on each of them. An employer that raises it with documentary support—say, a pre-employment questionnaire it contends was answered falsely—is asserting a recognized defense, but a false answer alone does not establish concealment, materiality, or the required connection to the injury, and the defense still has to be evaluated against the whole handling record. An employer that raises it as a label, with no evidence, and holds to it after receiving records that disprove it, has raised the question of culpable handling. Eligibility and preexisting-condition disputes generally are covered under maintenance and cure eligibility disputes.
There is no fixed number of days after which a delay becomes bad faith. Courts look at the whole course of conduct, not a calendar.
Unpaid Benefits, Additional Harm, Attorney Fees, and Punitive Damages Are Different Remedies
A successful maintenance-and-cure claim does not produce one large package of awards. Each remedy answers a different question, requires a different showing, and rests on different authority. The table below separates them. None is guaranteed, and this page does not offer award ranges or multipliers because no responsible lawyer can predict them from a description of the facts.
| Remedy | Purpose | What must be shown | Principal authority |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unpaid maintenance and cure | Make the seaman whole for benefits that should have been paid | Seaman status; injury or illness in the service of the vessel; benefits unpaid before MMI. The employer's motive is irrelevant. | General maritime law; see the parent page |
| Compensatory damages for harm caused by nonpayment | Compensate for injury caused by the withholding itself—for example, a condition that worsened because surgery was delayed, or expenses incurred because treatment was not authorized | Unreasonable refusal and a causal link between the refusal and the additional harm | Morales v. Garijak, 829 F.2d 1355, 1358 (5th Cir. 1987) |
| Attorney fees | Shift the cost of forcing payment onto an employer whose conduct made litigation necessary | Refusal that was callous and recalcitrant, arbitrary and capricious, or willful and persistent | Vaughan v. Atkinson, 369 U.S. 527 (1962); Morales, 829 F.2d at 1358 |
| Punitive damages | Punish and deter egregious disregard of the obligation | Willful and wanton disregard of the maintenance-and-cure obligation | Atlantic Sounding Co. v. Townsend, 557 U.S. 404, 424 (2009) |
A few points deserve emphasis.
Causation for additional harm is real and is often contested. Compensatory damages for unreasonable nonpayment address the harm caused by the withholding itself, not every loss flowing from the original injury. Maintenance and cure still covers the living expenses and curative treatment that the original injury requires, and other losses from that injury are pursued through whatever other claims apply to your situation. The compensatory tier of the maintenance-and-cure analysis covers only the increment of harm attributable to the nonpayment: the months a herniated disc went untreated because authorization was refused, not the disc injury itself. Separating those two is one of the most important pieces of analysis counsel performs.
Fee shifting is not the same as your fee agreement. Vaughan concerned a seaman who had to hire a lawyer to collect benefits from a shipowner that never investigated his claim; the Court permitted the fees to be recovered as an element of damages because the owner's conduct was callous and the litigation was forced upon him. 369 U.S. at 530–31. That is a court-ordered award against the employer. It is distinct from whatever contingency or other arrangement you have with your own lawyer, and it does not change your obligations under that agreement.
Punitive damages require willful and wanton disregard, not merely an unsuccessful defense. Townsend confirmed that punitive damages remain available under general maritime law for "the willful and wanton disregard of the maintenance and cure obligation," and described them as available "in the appropriate case." 557 U.S. at 424. Whether a particular record is the appropriate case is decided on the facts, and the fee and punitive standards are assessed independently rather than as one finding that unlocks the other.
Maintenance-and-Cure Punitive Damages Do Not Extend to Other Maritime Claims
An injured seaman frequently has more than one claim arising from the same incident: a maintenance-and-cure claim against the employer, a Jones Act negligence claim against the employer, and an unseaworthiness claim against the vessel owner. The punitive-damages holding in Townsend belongs to the first of these only.
In Dutra Group v. Batterton, 588 U.S. 358 (2019), the Supreme Court held that punitive damages are not available on a general maritime unseaworthiness claim. The Court distinguished Townsend, explaining that maintenance and cure has a distinct history in which punitive damages had been recognized, while unseaworthiness does not. Batterton did not narrow Townsend's maintenance-and-cure rule; it declined to extend it to a different cause of action.
Punitive damages are likewise not available on a Jones Act negligence claim. The Fifth Circuit, sitting en banc, so held in McBride v. Estis Well Service, L.L.C., 768 F.3d 382 (5th Cir. 2014), reasoning that the Jones Act limits a seaman's recovery to pecuniary losses. The maintenance-and-cure claim is therefore the only one of the three that carries potential punitive exposure, and only for qualifying misconduct. Workers covered by the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act rather than the Jones Act are not seamen, do not receive maintenance and cure, and have a different remedial scheme entirely.
The practical lesson is that the legal basis of each remedy has to be identified before anyone can say what a case may be worth. A lawyer who tells you that your unseaworthiness or Jones Act claim carries punitive exposure is wrong; a lawyer who tells you that a maintenance-and-cure claim never can is also wrong. The right answer depends on which claim, against whom, on what facts.
For the remedies available under the other claims, see the pages on Jones Act compensation and damages, unseaworthiness claims, and Longshore and Harbor Worker claims.
Preserve the Timeline: What the Employer Received, Said, and Did
Culpability in a maintenance-and-cure dispute is proven largely through chronology: what the employer had in hand, when it had it, and what it did next. You are in the best position to preserve the pieces of that chronology that passed through your hands. You do not need to organize them perfectly, and an incomplete file is not a reason to wait before seeking advice. Just keep what you have, as it is.
A practical chronology
For each contact with the employer or its claims handler about benefits or treatment, try to note:
| Field | What to record |
|---|---|
| Date | When you sent the request or received the communication |
| Recipient or sender | Name, title, company, and whether it was the employer, an adjuster, or a third-party administrator |
| Request | What you asked for: maintenance payment, treatment authorization, reimbursement, an explanation |
| Supporting document | What you sent with it: doctor's note, treatment recommendation, bill, prior records |
| Delivery confirmation | How you sent it and any proof it arrived: email, fax confirmation, certified mail receipt, text thread |
| Response | What they said, and how long it took |
| Stated reason | The reason given for any denial, delay, or termination—word for word if you can |
| Follow-up | Whether you responded to the stated reason and what you sent |
| Consequence | What happened as a result: missed treatment, unpaid rent, a lapsed prescription, a delayed surgery date |
Records worth keeping
- Emails, texts, and letters to and from the employer, its adjuster, or its administrator about your injury, benefits, or treatment
- Pay stubs, direct-deposit records, or check copies showing when maintenance was paid and when it stopped
- Every medical recommendation, referral, and treatment plan your doctors have given you
- Any written authorization or denial of treatment
- Medical bills and pharmacy receipts, especially ones that went unpaid because authorization was refused
- Notices of termination of benefits, MMI letters, or requests for independent medical examinations
- Your own contemporaneous notes of phone calls: date, who you spoke with, what was said
Each category tends to bear on something different. Delivery confirmations help show notice—that the employer had the information, and when. Stated reasons that shift over time bear on whether there was a genuine investigation or a justification assembled afterward. Payment records help fix timing. Unpaid bills and treatment delays are evidence of harm that may be traceable to the refusal, which is what the compensatory tier requires—though the link between the refusal and the harm still has to be proven. No single record proves bad faith, and none of these categories is conclusive on its own. The pattern is what counsel evaluates.
What not to do
Keep originals and complete threads; do not edit, excerpt, or "clean up" messages. Do not access company systems or files you are not authorized to see. Do not record conversations without understanding the law that applies to you—ask counsel first. And be aware that the employer's own claims-handling file—adjuster notes, internal emails, the medical opinions it relied on—is generally not something you will have. If a suit is filed, your lawyer can seek those materials through discovery, subject to the applicable procedural rules, relevance, and privilege objections. When they are obtained, they are often where the most important evidence of culpable handling is found.
Because these records include sensitive medical information, wait for instructions from the lawyer you retain about how to transmit them rather than sending them through a website form or an unencrypted email on your own initiative.
A Lawyer Can Evaluate Benefits Owed Separately From Possible Punitive Damages
Workers who reach this page are often behind on rent, waiting on a surgery that has not been approved, and being told by the company to get back on the boat. A long argument about punishment is not what they need first. The right approach separates the urgent from the eventual.
A sound review of a stopped maintenance-and-cure claim generally addresses four questions, in rough order of priority rather than as a fixed sequence:
- Confirm the underlying obligation. Are you a seaman? Did the injury or illness manifest in the service of the vessel? Have you reached maximum medical improvement, or is there curative treatment still available? If the obligation is not established, nothing else follows.
- Identify what is urgent. Is treatment being delayed? Are living expenses unpaid? These questions drive how quickly and in what form the employer is contacted and whether early court intervention on the benefits themselves is warranted.
- Examine the employer's stated reasons. What did it say, what evidence did it have, and did the reason survive the documentation you provided? This is the point at which a reasonable dispute and a culpable one begin to look different.
- Evaluate additional remedies. Assess whether the record supports compensatory damages for the nonpayment, attorney fees, or punitive damages under Townsend. This assessment draws on the first three questions, but it does not wait on them: evidence bearing on culpability is preserved from the outset, and counsel can press the urgent benefits questions while evaluating whether the handling record supports anything more.
The critical point is that a negative answer on the fourth question does not undo the first three. If the evidence does not support punitive damages, but the underlying obligation is established and you have not reached MMI, you are still owed your maintenance and the curative treatment your condition requires, and an unreasonable refusal can still be remedied on its own terms. Enhanced remedies are a possible addition to a benefits claim, not a precondition for it.
What happens procedurally—demand letters, requests for the medical basis of a denial, a motion for payment, a full suit combining the maintenance-and-cure claim with Jones Act and unseaworthiness claims—depends on your facts, your forum, and the employer's response. No lawyer can promise a payment timetable or a guaranteed expedited order. What a lawyer can do is make sure the employer's obligation is asserted clearly, that its reasons are put to the test against the evidence, and that the record needed for every tier of remedy is being built from the start rather than reconstructed later.
The details of resolving a denial or securing treatment rights are addressed elsewhere on this site, including the page on medical treatment rights under cure. This page's contribution is narrower: know that the benefits question and the accountability question run in parallel, and that neither has to wait on the other.
Legal Authorities Behind the Bad-Faith Maintenance-and-Cure Analysis
The statements on this page rest principally on the following decisions. Each stands for a specific proposition and should not be stretched beyond it.
Atlantic Sounding Co. v. Townsend, 557 U.S. 404 (2009) — U.S. Supreme Court. Held that punitive damages remain available under general maritime law for an employer's willful and wanton disregard of its maintenance-and-cure obligation. The Court grounded the remedy in the long common-law and maritime history of punitive damages and found nothing in the Jones Act displacing it. Id. at 424. This is the authority for punitive damages in this context and the source of the "willful and wanton" standard.
Vaughan v. Atkinson, 369 U.S. 527 (1962) — U.S. Supreme Court. Held that a seaman forced to hire counsel to recover maintenance and cure from a shipowner that was callous in its attitude and made no investigation of his claim could recover his attorney fees as damages. Id. at 530–31. The Court also confirmed that ambiguities or doubts about a seaman's entitlement are resolved in the seaman's favor. Id. at 532. This is the foundation for fee shifting in culpable-refusal cases.
Morales v. Garijak, Inc., 829 F.2d 1355 (5th Cir. 1987) — U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Articulated the graduated scale: reasonable refusal exposes the employer only to the benefits owed; unreasonable refusal adds liability for compensatory damages caused by the refusal; more egregious conduct—callous and recalcitrant, arbitrary and capricious, or willful and persistent—adds attorney fees. Id. at 1358. Morales predates Townsend and must be read alongside it and subsequent Fifth Circuit decisions, but its structure remains the framework courts in this circuit use.
Dutra Group v. Batterton, 588 U.S. 358 (2019) — U.S. Supreme Court. Held that punitive damages are unavailable on a general maritime unseaworthiness claim, and distinguished Townsend on the ground that maintenance and cure has a distinct historical pedigree. Batterton left Townsend's maintenance-and-cure rule in place.
McBride v. Estis Well Service, L.L.C., 768 F.3d 382 (5th Cir. 2014) (en banc) — U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Held that punitive damages are not recoverable by a seaman under the Jones Act, which limits recovery to pecuniary losses. This is why the Jones Act negligence claim does not carry the punitive exposure that a qualifying maintenance-and-cure claim can.
Why the Fifth Circuit matters here
The Fifth Circuit is the federal appellate court for Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Its decisions bind federal district courts in those states and are highly influential in state courts hearing maritime claims there. That is not true of the entire Gulf Coast—Alabama and Florida sit in the Eleventh Circuit—and the choice of forum can affect which appellate authority controls. Where your case is filed is itself a matter for case-specific legal judgment.
A note on the limits of this page
This page provides general information about how courts analyze culpable handling of maintenance-and-cure claims. It is not legal advice and does not reach a conclusion about any particular seaman's claim. The law summarized here is subject to change, and its application to your facts requires review of your medical records, your employer's communications, and the procedural posture of your case. Reading this page or contacting the firm does not by itself make The Young Firm your lawyer; representation begins only when the firm agrees to take your case.
Ask The Young Firm to Review Withheld Benefits and Possible Bad Faith
If your maintenance-and-cure payments have stopped, your treatment is being refused, or your employer has given you a reason for cutting off benefits that does not match what your doctors are telling you, you can ask The Young Firm to review both the benefits you may be owed and the way your claim has been handled.
You do not need a complete file. You do not need to have decided whether the employer acted in bad faith. To start, it helps to be able to share:
- Where you worked, the vessel or vessels you were assigned to, and your job
- When and how you were injured or became ill
- When benefits or treatment authorization changed, and the reason you were given
- Whether you are currently waiting on treatment, a surgery date, or a prescription
- Any written communications from the employer or its adjuster you already have
No one can tell you at intake that punitive damages are available; what a lawyer can tell you is whether the facts warrant pursuing that question alongside the benefits claim.
If you are earlier in the process and want to understand maintenance and cure more broadly before deciding whether to reach out, start with the parent page on maintenance and cure claims. If your situation is already one of stopped payments and an employer that has stopped listening, contact The Young Firm in New Orleans to request a review.