Source: WalletHub Earlier this month, personal finance site WalletHub published a report ranking the best and worst states for physicians. They based the rankings on a variety of factors, including the cost of medical malpractice insurance, the amount of malpractice award payouts per capita in the previous year and average physician wages, as well as […]

by Michael Matray, editor of Medical Liability Monitor Two decades since the term “hospitalist” was first coined in a 1996 New England Journal of Medicine article looking at the expanding role of general internists employed in the hospital setting, the more than 44,000 hospitalists nationwide are more critical to the success of the American hospital […]

by Michael Matray, editor of Medical Liability Monitor The Affordable Care Act of 2010 extended health insurance coverage to roughly 20 million new Americans, driving the uninsured rate to historic lows. The influx of new patients to the healthcare delivery system has necessitated that many physicians make greater use of nurses in order to keep […]

Richard E. Anderson, MD, FACP, the Chairman and CEO of The Doctors Company, recently sat down with Healthcare Matters for a wide-ranging interview on the topic of defensive medicine. Dr. Anderson has been a thought-leader in the field since publishing the article Billions for Defense: The Pervasive Nature of Defensive Medicine in 1999. During the […]

In the final segment of our interview with Dr. Richard Anderson, Chairman and CEO of The Doctors Company, we ask him if and how the medical liability landscape has changed since he published the article Billions for Defense: The Pervasive Nature of Defensive Medicine in 1999. Dr. Anderson’s response is that the practice of defensive […]

In part six of our interview with Dr. Richard Anderson, Chairman and CEO of The Doctors Company, we discuss whether further tort reform is necessary, given that claims frequency is at an all-time low and the medical malpractice insurance industry is experiencing its longest soft market in history. Though this is true, with claims down […]

In segment five of our interview with Dr. Richard Anderson, Chairman and CEO of The Doctors Company, we ask him about the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA), which was enacted in California in 1975. MICRA was instituted to help lower medical malpractice insurance premiums, which had become prohibitively expensive for many physicians in California […]

Defensive medicine is notoriously hard to quantify, with estimates of the cost to the U.S. healthcare system ranging anywhere between $46 billion and $850 billion. Yet, it is a pervasive part of the medical system. To complement the Healthcare Matters interview series, The State of Defensive Medicine, featuring Richard E. Anderson, MD, FACP, Chairman and […]

Part four of our interview series with Dr. Richard Anderson, Chairman and CEO of The Doctors Company, addresses alternatives to the current medical malpractice system, including mediation and arbitration and specialized health courts. Dr. Anderson points out that “More than 80 percent of all medical malpractice claims close with no indemnity payment… anything that would […]