For the last few years, insurance firms have pushed to limit the liability of doctors and hospitals when they injure patients due to negligence or error. The companies, along with the American Medical Association, aruge that skyrocketing insurance premiums for physicians are driven by exponentially increasing claims payments made to injured patients who file claims and lawsuits for medical malpractice.
Well, the data is in, and the medical-insurance lobby has been lying. New reports from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the journal Health Affairs (reported in today's LA Times) show that the number of medical malpractice claims per doctor has actually declined over the past twelve years. Also, the average claim payments have essentially risen with the rate of inflation. The industry's rhetoric about extreme payouts and escalating jury awards has been mere fabrication, the lobbyist's equivalent of poetic license.
That patient claims have not risen even as malpractice insurance premiums for doctors have gone through roof may seem counter-intuituve, but it is not contradictory. Insurance companies raise premiums because they can not because they have to. They throw around phony numbers about big jury awards as an act of political misdirection to shift the blame for their profiteering towards patients or the legal system, or, most often, to the the old standard in the blame game: lawyers.
But if facts matter anymore (and that's a much longer conversation), these new studies should put to bed the push for new laws that cap claim payments to injured patients as a solution to high insurance premiums for docs. You'd think that any politician with an ego (and a few of them have one) would turn on the insurance companies and say: You convinced us there was a problem, but lied to us about why it existed. So we must conclude that the problem is...you. With these facts, lawmakers ought to turn their attention to reforming the insurance industry.
And there's good precedent. Under California's reform law (Proposition 103), doctors and nurses have saved $62 million through public challenges to unjustified rate hikes over the last few years. (See the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights medical malpractice webpage for more.)
So the facts are in. Let's see if they matter.