Viti

My apologies, I must retract. Here is the thread . Apparently there is no evidence that tort reforms reduce premiums nor is there any evidence that they don't.

This is a difficult subject for me. I donated a kidney to a friend who lost his to malpractice, and he won his case and received a substantial award even in a state with caps. On the other hand, I lost my gynecologist of 10 years when his malpractice insurance premiums suddenly rose above his previous year's income. I also have been fighting insurance companies for coverage of infertility, and know that non-medically trained businesspeople are often determining the scope of our medical care.

I don't know what the answers are

ETA: I Googled "Malpractice insurance premiums and tort reform". Looks like there is a bunch of conflicting info to wade through.

An article saying tort reform does not reduce premiums
St. Paul is the company that suddenly quit the business which caused Nevada's crisis.

Barbarossa

Who is saying that he should?

The issue here, though, is that the patient is being forced to sign what is in effect a loyalty oath to her doctor to be able to retain the privilege of being treated by that doctor. Why is that acceptable to you?

Dragon

Or like how the American military protects it's abusive soldiers, am I right?

Viti

I had to sign an arbitration agreement before my new gynecologist would take me as a patient. After losing my long term doctor I just signed, figuring it was the only way he could afford to practice in Nevada.

Loren Pechtel

Selection bias is the term you're looking for.

However, the numbers are consistent with what I've seen elsewhere. They're low for what I've seen for Nevada. I see no reason to think the survey is flawed.

Loren Pechtel

The lawyers would love to have you believe it. However:

1) Nevada enacted some reforms last session. Of course it had no effect on premiums--the law has a hole you can drive a truck through and it hasn't been tested in court. Does that mean tort reform doesn't work?

2) What the doctors are after here is basically a copy of what they see working in California. If it wasn't working, why would they want to copy it??

Loren Pechtel

http://www.acog.org/from_home/publications/press_releases/nr07-16-04.cfm the data from the horse's mouth.

True, but they have 47,000 members. I think it unlikely that they are not reasonably representative of ObGyns. The survey response rate was 45%--not too shabby.

I'd say the data is a reasonably accurate picture of the liability picture. It also blows out of the water the notion that it's a few bad doctors.

I do agree that there are some bad apples out there. If lawsuits actually were against the bad apples the claims record would stand out and the insurance companies wouldn't touch them.

Loren Pechtel

You realize that the top guy there is a lawyer?

Viti

As I said in the post, there was a lot of conflicting info out there and I need to read through it. That article was just an example.

Stephen Maturin

Substitute "definitely" for "prolly" and we're in complete agreement. The simple truth of the matter is that medical malpractice insurance rates rise faster in states with tort "reform" than in states without it.

Correctamundo. Doctors are getting fucked six ways to Sunday, and the insurance industry has bullshitted them into believing that tort reform will generate relief from crushing malpractice insurance premiums. That's why we're seeing stories like the one linked in the OP.

California's experience provides a useful example. Around 1975 the state legislature enacted an especially draconian medical malpractice "reform" law. By 1988, malpractice insurance premiums were up something like 400%. The state's voters passed an insurance reform initiative that, among other things, eliminated the insurance industry's exemption from state antitrust laws and required rigorous scrutiny of insurance companies' rate increase requests. (In most states, the agency charged with regulating insurance premiums simply rubber-stamps all such requests.) Only after the insurance reform initiative took hold did malpractice premiums begin to stabilize.

If Congress is really interested in doing something about all this, it should give serious consideration to removing the insurance industry's exemption from federal antitrust law. Someone (Sen. Pat Leahy, if memory serves) floated that idea when malpractice "reform" was under debate last year, but the Republicans screamed bloody murder. Heaven forbid that insurers should lose their God-given right to engage in price fixing.

St. Paul Companies (I assume that's the outfit you're talking about) dumped med mal and a couple of other high-risk lines not because of malpractice litigation loss but rather because of catastrophic losses on investments, including some $100 million in the Enron debacle. Interestingly enough, St. Paul's own internal studies concluded that capping recoveries has an extremely minimal effect on malpractice insurance premiums and that all other aspects of malpractice reform have virtually no effect at all.

They're lying. Wanna know what lie they'll tell when insurance premiums don't drop after the state supreme court upholds the law?

Punitive damages are not a subset of noneconomic damages. Noneconomic damages are strictly compensatory and include a whole lot more than pain and suffering.

Punitive damages aren't a real issue with respect to medical malpractice litigation since they're almost never awarded. A doctor would have to perform surgery stoned or do something akin to a felonious assault to get hit with a judgment that included an award of punitive damages.

Insurance companies don't much care about punitives, either, since no insurance policy provides coverage for such damages.