Which specialties face the highest malpractice premiums? Premiums are a function of the expected cost to insure a physician against potential malpractice suits. Thus, premiums are higher for specialties that have a higher risk of having a claim filed against them or specialties where the average payout conditional on having a claim is higher. A [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Archive for the 'Malpractice' Category
What are the odds that your malpractice claim makes it to court?
Americans are a litigious culture. The high number of medical malpractice cases causes both political parties to call for reform. The malpractice claims that make it to court, however, are not many as you may think. According to the Wilson Quarterly: A surprising number of cases “simply disappear, as plaintiffs abandon them,” writes Dwight Golann studied [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Is ‘Loser Pays’ the solution for frivolous Medical Malpractice Lawsuits?
Frivolous lawsuits may increase medical spending in two ways: i) they increase the cost for physicians to practice medicine by raising malpractice insurance premiums, and ii) they increase utilization of unnecessary services when physicians practice ‘defensive medicine’. Creating a ‘loser pays’ tort system may be the best way to stop frivolous lawsuits. Loser-pays in the U.S. [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Does Health Reform Change the Malpractice System
Health Reform (a.k.a. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act [PPACA]) provides two small provisions that will affect malpractice costs. Randall Bobvjerg explains: “As enacted, PPACA contained only two, quite limited malpractice provisions. Section 10607 authorized malpractice demonstrations by states, and section 10608 extended federal malpractice protections to free clinics’ nonmedical personnel. The demonstration authority comes [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Malpractice in China
In the U.S., physicians often fear that if a patient experiences a bad health outcome, the physician will be liable for millions of dollars as part of a malpractice suit. Although the malpractice system in the U.S. may be far from perfect, most physicians would certainly prefer it over the more informal forms of “malpractice” [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Best Practice Insurance
Problems: Malpractice Insurance is expensive. Medical errors are associated with 98,000 deaths every year [more than twice the deaths from car accidents by some estimates.] About two-thirds of the guidelines developed by AHPR between 1990 and 1996 were out of date with current research by 2001. Solutions: One solution is to enact damage caps. These [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Scottish NHS pay £23 million in compensation, but U.S isn’t doing any better.
The Scotland Sun reports that the Scottish NHS paid £23 million ($40 million) to patients for subpar care. Is this due to the inherently substandard quality of care in a single-payer system? The answer is likely no. This figure only amounts to about £4.50 ($7.34) for every person in Scotland however. Drug-related errors in the [...]
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