side note: The Louisiana Medical Society took heed from the woes of states like Wisconsin and New Hampshire. Both state governments raided their Patient Compensation Fund as a way of balancing their budgets. Both states’ medical societies fought the move in court; both medical societies came out winners. While both PCFs were eventually given their […]

side note: The below article is very interesting in the fact that Mississippi’s largest medical malpractice insurer, Medical Assurance Company of Mississippi (MACM), has gone on the record as saying the state does not need additional tort reforms. That’s right, a medical malpractice insurance company is saying no more tort reform is necessary. Specifically, the […]

side note: Conservative Arizona lawmakers are trying to remove obstacles that forbid the General Assembly from imposing caps on the amount of money recoverable for non-economic and punitive damages. Those obstacles are Article 2 sec. 31 and Article 18 sec. 6 of Arizona’s constitution, which specifically prohibit limiting recoverable damages. In short, the two articles […]

The medical liability climate in Florida is a mess. Medical malpractice insurance in Miami’s Dade County is more expensive than any other in the nation, and the high cost of medical malpractice premiums influence too many doctors in the Sunshine State to choose to practice bare, without any liability insurance coverage at all. Add the […]

A new study of call into question the commonly held belief that Texas’s 2003 tort reform not only lowered medical malpractice insurance premiums, but also attracted an influx of doctors to serve the state’s more rural patients The 2003 Texas tort reforms are legendary in medical malpractice insurance circles. At the heart of the reforms […]

In June, Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Jose Rodriguez denied a defense motion to reduce a jury verdict for noneconomic damages from $500,000 to $350,000 because the defense offered to arbitrate the claim, further chipping away at Florida’s tort reform laws that cap noneconomic damages in medical professional liability actions. In 2014, the Florida Supreme Court […]

The Oregon Supreme Court last month invalidated statutory limits on noneconomic damages for personal injury claims. The high court ruled that the cap enacted by the legislature in 1987 violates the legal remedy clause of the Oregon Constitution. The decision affirmed an appeals court’s reversal of a trial court ruling on an award for a […]

Dr. Randall Floyd called me in a bit of a panic. An addiction medicine specialist in Anchorage, Alaska, he had put off securing a replacement medical malpractice insurance policy for almost a month past the expiration of his previous policy. The medical group he was employed with had changed their corporate structure where they were […]

Dr. Samuel Smith, a psychiatrist in California, contacted me on a recent Monday in a bit of a rush. He was joining a new medical group the following week and they were trying to add him to their group’s medical malpractice insurance policy with their standard carrier. However, the medical malpractice carrier denied him coverage […]