Ambiguous prepositional phrase in a legal document [closed]

Solution 1:

From a logical perspective, the problem with the question as posted —

Have you enrolled or will soon enroll in health insurance but your health coverage has not started yet?

—is that it invites negative responses from people who fall into two fundamentally different categories.

On the one hand, if you have not enrolled in health insurance and will not soon enroll in health insurance, you can hardly answer "yes" to a question that states as its antecedent condition that you have enrolled or soon will enroll in health insurance; this is quite aside from the question of whether the coverage has started yet—although, obviously, it can't have started if you haven't enrolled.

But on the other hand, if you have enrolled and the coverage has begun, you can hardly answer "yes" to a question framed as "your health coverage has not started yet."

In short, the document asks this question in such a way that the only situation in which it would be logical to answer "yes" is one in which you have enrolled or will soon enroll in health insurance and yet the coverage has not yet begun.

If the author of the document for some reason cares only about people who fall into that particular category of respondents, it doesn't matter that two disparate groups of people get thrown into the same "no" category—and the question as worded has no fatal flaw.

But if the author of the document has any interest in distinguishing—now or in the future—between people who are already enrolled and covered and people who are neither enrolled nor about to enroll nor covered, that author is creating the conditions for a heap of trouble down the road that a more carefully worded question could easily have avoided.

With regard to the grouping issue related to whether the question should be read as

(Have you enrolled or will soon enroll in health insurance) but your health coverage has not started yet?

or as

Have you enrolled or (will soon enroll in health insurance but your health coverage has not started yet)?

I think the issue is illusory in this particular case—although it is certainly very important for people who are drawing up legal documents to be aware of the logical complications posed by sentences that might be interpreted either as "A or (B but C)" or as "(A or B) but C."

It is illusory in this case because the "but C" clause of the sentence is nontrivial only when applied to the "A" clause; the "B" clause necessarily implies the "but C" clause here. That is, it is possible for someone to have enrolled but not yet begun to be covered (assuming that coverage doesn't start at the moment of enrollment), but it is not possible to be planning to enroll "soon" and to be covered already.

Therefore, the combination "[you] have enrolled in health insurance but your health coverage has not started yet" presents a meaningful subcategory within the category "[you] have enrolled in health insurance"; but "[you] will soon enroll in health insurance but your health coverage has not started yet" is trivial because every member of the "[you] will soon enroll in health insurance" category will also fall into the "[you] will soon enroll in health insurance but your health coverage has not started yet" subcategory.

It follows that reading the sentence as incorporating the ordering principle of "(A or B) but C" provides a logical justification for including the "but C" term, whereas reading the sentence as incorporating the ordering principle "A or (B but C)" renders the "but C" term completely superfluous.

I seem to recall from my law school days that courts have a bias toward interpreting contractual terms in a way that treats them as meaningful rather than meaningless; I would have that bias if I were a judge. But regardless of how a court might rule on this question as a matter of law, the logical argument favoring "(A or B) but C" over "A or (B but C)" in this case is extremely strong.