556
Opinion of the Court
ignorance of the fact of his injury or its cause should receive identical treatment. That he has been injured in fact may be unknown or unknowable until the injury manifests itself; and the facts about causation may be in the control of the putative defendant, unavailable to the plaintiff or at least very difficult to obtain. The prospect is not so bleak for a plaintiff in possession of the critical facts that he has been hurt and who has inflicted the injury. He is no longer at the mercy of the latter. There are others who can tell him if he has been wronged, and he need only ask." United States v. Kubrick, 444 U. S. 111, 122 (1979).
A person suffering from inadequate treatment is thus responsible for determining within the limitations period then running whether the inadequacy was malpractice.
We see no good reason for accepting a lesser degree of responsibility on the part of a RICO plaintiff. It is true, of course, as Rotella points out, that RICO has a unique pattern requirement, see Malley-Duff, supra, at 154 ("[T]he heart of any RICO complaint is the allegation of a pattern of racketeering"); H. J. Inc. v. Northwestern Bell Telephone Co., 492 U. S. 229, 236 (1989) (referring to "RICO's key requirement of a pattern of racketeering"). And it is true as well that a pattern of predicate acts may well be complex, concealed, or fraudulent. But identifying professional negligence may also be a matter of real complexity, and its discovery is not required before the statute starts running. Kubrick, supra, at 122, 124. Although we said that the potential malpractice plaintiff "need only ask" if he has been wronged by a doctor, considerable enquiry and investigation may be necessary before he can make a responsible judgment about the actionability of the unsuccessful treatment he received. The fact, then, that a considerable effort may be required before a RICO plaintiff can tell whether a pattern of racketeering is demonstrable does not place him in a significantly different position from the malpractice victim. A RICO plaintiff's
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