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medpundit |
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Tuesday, June 29, 2004I can reply to the issue he raises from Missouri. The data was skewed by NOT including any payouts from large self insured health care organizations (which apparently had been included in the past). The jury is out on whether it was a deliberate white wash (as our chief executive [the governor - ed.] really was in need of data to support his decision to veto tort reform at the behest of some of his best contributors). However, I would posit that what the payouts have been between 2002 and 2003 (or even 2001 and 2003) is the wrong number to look at. Every time there is a "crisis" and it gets media play, juries get tighter. What we should be looking at is what payouts have done between 1990 and 2002 (and it was a phenomenal jump). We were spared the increased premiums as long as the insurance companies were doing well in the stock market, but as our "roaring 90's" came to a close suddenly premiums had to play catch up to both match payouts and replenish reserves. UPDATE: Chris Rangel has more thoughts on medicine and malpractice, as usual. AND YET MORE: A Tort et a Travers explains that the cost of defending suits, not the cost of losing suits, is one prime driver behind malpractice insurance rates: What is even worse is the medmal industry incurred 25.63 percent of direct premiums written in incurred defense costs while the overall industry incurred 5.56 percent of direct premiums written on defense costs. Thus, the medmal industry has a different defense cost structure than the industry as a whole and this is just one of a number of reasons med mal premiums are so high! And he's got tables of data to prove it. posted by Sydney on 6/29/2004 01:21:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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