A San Diego jury recently awarded $5.7 million to a man whose doctor failed to diagnose his skin cancer, but the amount will be reduced to $1.9 million because of California’s medical malpractice award cap. Most states do not have medical malpractice caps, and the entire award would have been paid to the plaintiff in those states.
There is much debate over whether or not medical malpractice caps serve their intended purpose of lowering doctors’ insurance premiums. In the last few years, rising insurance premiums on medical malpractice insurance have emerged as a crisis of sorts among the medical community, invading the practice of medicine, and threatening the availability of medical care. Some doctors in high risk specialties may receive insurance renewal notices announcing their premiums increased as much as 100 to 200% over the previous year. Other physicians are dropped from their insurance carriers causing them to practice medicine without medical malpractice insurance or to stop practicing altogether.
The insurance industry, has, in the past, placed the blame for these outrageous premiums on the huge monetary settlements that victims of medical malpractice are awarded in court. However, GE Medical Protective, the United States largest medical malpractice insurer admits that caps have done nothing to lower medical insurance premiums and will not do anything to lower them in the future. The consensus seems to be that the cap laws only serve to reward the doctors who committed the malpractice and their insurance companies because there is a limit in some states to what victims can win.
While the implementation of caps has certainly resulted in lower claim payouts for insurers in many states, the intended result of lowering doctors’ insurance premiums has clearly not happened and will not be happening anytime soon.
