Posted On: March 22, 2005, 2:09 pm CST

Posted By: Florida Product Analyst

There's also yet another method to mitigate med mal suits and awards -- enact serious risk management changes to prevent malpractice to begin with. As risk management professionals, maybe the medical malpractice insurance industry can take a harder statistical look at the types of conditions that can tend to drive actual malpractice (understaffed hospitals, outdated information tracking of critical health issues, etc.) and add those to their UW guidelines. I think trying to smack caps on damage awards is a misplaced bandaid, especially since I've seen several studies that would indicate there isn't really a runaway jury award problem so much as an insurance/reinsurance and medical mistakes problem.

Anyway, my experience is in property/casualty rather than health, but I think many of the same principles could apply here. As members of the insurance industry, we should certainly do what we can to defend our policies and policyholders in court. However, I'm getting back on my "return to the basic principles of risk management to mitigate potential liabilities" soapbox on this one -- let's manage our risk first, THEN see if that doesn't bring our loss ratios closer in-line.