In its March 7, 2009 print edition, the Clarion-Ledger editorializes about the 60% decline in premium costs for medical malpractice insurance for physicians since the passage of tort reform legislation. I was not able to find the editorial on-line in order to link it.
The Ledger points out that the plaintiff’s bar wrongly predicted that malpractice premiums would not decline following tort reform. While this is a true statement, the Ledger is wrong to give all the credit to legislative tort reform. I believe that there were at least two other factors that had a significant impact on malpractice premiums.
First, a court-imposed change in multi-plaintiff joinder laws. In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, physicians were being named as defendants in pharmaceutical and other mass tort cases filed in Mississippi. In many instances, the physicians were not really target defendants and were sued in an effort to prevent out of state corporations from removing the cases from state court to federal court. But the physicians’ insurance carriers had to hire lawyers to defend the cases. And since the nature of multi-party mass tort cases makes them more expensive to defend, medical insurers had to spend a ton of money on defense costs in cases that the doctors should not have even been in.
At some point–and I do not remember the exact year–joinder laws were changed so that each plaintiff had to file and litigate his case individually. Once that happened, out-of-state mass tort lawyers largely left the state and the number of filed cases in which doctors were “venue” defendants decreased significantly.
The second factor not identified by the Ledger was the perception by some in the plaintiff’s bar that the Mississippi Supreme Court would not affirm a plaintiff’s verdict in a medical malpractice case. This had a chilling affect on the number of malpractice cases filed. It should be noted that in recent months the Supreme Court has affirmed at least two medical malpractice verdicts.
If the Ledger was correct that tort reform was the sole reason that doctors’ insurance premiums declined, then wouldn’t all liability premiums be lower? My personal experience with insurance premiums is that my malpractice premiums have gone up and my personal general liability coverage has not decreased.
Hopefully, the sea-change in the litigation climate will settle down physicians and decrease the open hostility by some doctors towards the plaintiff’s bar.