Wisconsin medical malpractice insurance costs

Medical malpractice insurance companies and even the American Medical Association try to blame "excess litigation" and "high jury verdicts" as the reasons for high medical malpractice insurance premiums.  Certainly, insurers have motives for blaming lawyers and lawsuits, which include deferring the frustration doctors have with costly premiums. 

Medical malpractice insurers would rather obscure the issue calling on governments to enact irrational caps on damages arbitrarily limiting amounts persons may recover for disability and disfigurement.  Not coincidently, such caps increased insurers to past profits.  Recently however, an ally of the medical malpractice insurance industry revealed some truths.

An October 11, 2002 article from the Denver Post describes how that "Insurance companies have exaggerated the impact of malpractice claims to increase doctors' premiums."  The article further reported how:

Once adjusted for inflation, insurance company losses linked to malpractice payments have remained stable over the last 30 years, according to the study. So, there is no truth to insurance and medical industry claims that an explosion in jury awards has fostered an escalation in physician premiums in some states, the study said.

Similarly, an article published June 24, 2002 in the conservative Wall Street Journal blames insurers' bad accounting and greed as having a "big effect on premiums."  It states that when the bull market ended in 2000, investment gains that had covered up bad insurance practices disappeared.  As a result, some doctors' medical malpractice insurance premiums sky-rocketed even though "doctors and hospitals win [medical malpractice lawsuits] about 62% of the time."

The Wall Street Journal article reported that "Some doctors are beginning to acknowledge that the conventional focus on jury awards deflects attention from the insurance industry's behavior.   The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists for the first time is conceding that carriers' business practices have contributed to the current problem...."    A CEO of a leading medical malpractice insurer was quoted as stating: "I don't like to hear insurance-company executives say it's the tort [injury-law] system -- it's self-inflicted."

See also, Wisconsin Medical Malpractice Law & Medical Malpractice Tort Reform

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