Malpractice Insurance

Are there any plans to cut the cost of malpractice insurance. I think doctors would be ecstatic if the price of malpractice insurance was drastically reduced. The government offers flood insurance at affordable rates....why not malpractice insurance? Also, if doctors who killed people by incompetence were deprived of their licenses that would help the situation. (Is this the case now?) Anyway, I would love to hear from health care providers on this topic. What would it mean to practitioners if the cost of mp insurance were cut, say, ninety percent? Thanks.

wouldn't the government need to establish the value of a life? Or the value of a limb? Or the value of suffering if one sponge or two sponges or one instrument, etc. was if left in a body. And wouldn't it be so much per day for each day before the instruments or sponges were found? Or, what if the surgical instruments were cleaned in hydraulic fluid instead of soap and resulted in infections and complications that were not discovered for years. How would the government value all of the contingencies. Seems to me before they can lower the premium cost they have to set a value on human life, limb, mistakes and suffering.

Doesn't seem possible. In fact, not even the government's job.

There should be a system of values, if necessary, in the laws of the land. I don't see it as government decided. Juries make determinations, I suppose. It is an interesting subject.

against them will come down.

My insurer sends out newsletters frequently, and the majority of the lawsuits and threatened actions are completely baseless and arise out of clients' medical ignorance. Every once in a while they report on a legitimate case, but they are definitely the exception.

Human medicine may be somewhat different.

How can they be stopped and who decides if they are frivolous before a court case?

Never, ever ...

The doctors who support malpractice dollar caps achieve nothing for their support.

It is so very amazing.

whether or not there is a problem with the vet's standard of care as compared to the community. The vast majority of these cases, no expert is ever even consulted by the plaintiffs, so they are either forced to settle for nothing, or they lose in court.

Unfortunately, fools are like whatever that mythological creature was - you cut off one head and five more grow in its place. New fools sue, never having learned from the mistakes of previous fools.

Working in the field, I see instances of both types, and there are definitely hospitals and doctors that deny all wrongdoing in every instance, fight every claim, run up thousands of dollars in costs and protect the good old boys no matter how incompetent they are. Claimants (or quite often, their survivors) are put through an emotional meat grinder and worn down by months if not years of delay, innuendo, rumor and soft character assassination.

aka - a red herring.

that a doctor has to fork over large wadges of cash for mp insurance. Is that true? Total healthcare costs are a really big number. 2% is probably still a lot and it comes out of the docs pocket. Yes or no?

I agree its hard to quantify, and the actual percent paid for malpractice premiums may be 2% overall (although that varies drastically by the type of facility/doctor), but defensive medicine makes up a huge percentage of medical costs I've seen.

we need to replace the tort system with something that more closely resembles a workers comp board. Then, we need to make the results public. No more hiding behind gag orders, resulting from years of litigation where only lawyers get rich.

(5) loss history, and a variety of other factors.

Contrary to public opinion, there's a lot more medical malpractice than there are lawsuits pursuing claims for malpractice. Hospitals over work and under hire, stretching the nurses and aides over too many patients. Doctors run patients through too quickly to listen properly and diagnose properly each one. Insurers deny procedures that could have found and/or corrected some emerging health problem.

If all the malpractice claims were cut in half, the impact on what you pay for health care would be negligible.

What we need is HEALTH CARE. Not insurance to provide or help provide health care. When you're a soldier and you need a doctor, you go to the medical facilities provided and they send you to the doctor you need. That's a good system. When I was in the military, I loved it. Why shouldn't we have such a system? In such a system, getting rid of malpractice claims, or making them fairly limited and only based upon the most egregious of mistakes or results, would help deal with the problem of such claims unnecessarily draining the system.

the cost of most PI (Professional Indemnity) policies are rising this year by approximately 30%. I would imagine that medical malpractice falls broadly into this policy.

Some investigation into why, found that rising liability insurance rates for - wait for it - 'financial advisors', were pushing up the premiums of all other professions.