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A: Not necessarily. In Orlando Ramirez v. American Pollution Control Corporation, the Fifth Circuit recently held that the shipowner is not obligated to provide maintenance and cure only if it can prove:
1) the worker intentionally concealed or misrepresented medical facts;
2) those non-disclosed facts were material to the decision to hire the worker;
3) there was a connection between the omitted facts and the injury.
Say a deckhand breaks his ankle but never disclosed that he had three previous back injuries. On the one hand, the back history had nothing directly to do with the ankle. On the other hand, if the company had known about the past injuries, it may never have hired him to begin with, and he would not have had the accident.
It's a slippery slope.
