More Medical Malpractice Myths

May 28, 2010 by Andrew

Here’s another great article about tort reform myths which was written just after the 2003 tort reform legislation was passed.

Here’s an excerpt:

The purpose of Proposition 12′s severe restrictions on victims’ rights was to lower malpractice insurance premiums, which had seen double-digit increases. In Texas, as elsewhere, the tort reformers exploited the rate hikes as part of a scare campaign to sell reform. However, the facts show that the legal system is not driving insurance rates. Tort actions at the state level – meaning personal-injury lawsuits, everything from product liability to traffic accidents to libel have fallen 5 percent in nine years, according to the National Center for State Courts.

More specifically, malpractice filings declined nationally by about 4 percent between 1995 and 2000. And while a recent analysis of the Medicare population estimated that medical errors kill 131,000 people annually, making it the fourth leading cause of death, medical suits are only 5 percent of personal-injury filings, with product liability cases another 5 percent. Plaintiffs lose 60 percent of product cases and 70 percent of malpractice suits.

Not only are socially significant lawsuits like malpractice and product liability a small fraction of the legal picture but numerous studies show that capping damages doesn’t affect insuance premiums. One survey examined insurance rates between 1985 and 1998, then ranked the states according to the severity of their restrictions on lawsuits. Increased severity did not produce lower rates. In Texas, where malpractice filings dropped 20 percent in the nine years before Proposition 12, the liability picture has been little improved by its passage. About a third of doctors will see a decrease of 12 percent after cumulative increases of 147 percent. The rest will either get no relief or double-digit increases.

According to J. Robert Hunter, Federal Insurance Administrator under Presidents Ford and Carter, caps don’t work because liability rates reflect not litigation costs but the insurance industry’s own practices. During good times, insurers write policies even for the worst risks to generate cash for investment. When the stock market tanks, rates climb steeply to cover losses. The current liability crisis, Hunter notes, coincided with the market downturn that began in the summer of 2001. And since the insurance cycle is international, the “hard market” also drove up premiums in Canada, Australia and France. And those countries have totally different legal systems, Hunter says.

…

The numbers show that lawsuits are an insignificant cost both to businesses and to health providers, for whom they represent less than 2 percent of spending. In short, the lawsuit-abuse crisis is a hoax.

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