More than 400 similar facilities, called long-term acute care hospitals, have opened nationally in the last 25 years. Few of them have doctors on staff, and most are owned by for-profit companies. The Kansas City hospital is part of a chain called the Select Medical Corporation, a publicly traded Pennsylvania company that runs 89 long-term hospitals, more than any other company.

Lawsuits, state inspection reports and statistics deep in federal reports paint a troubling picture of the care offered at some Select hospitals, and at long-term care hospitals in general.

In 2007 and 2008, Select’s hospitals were cited at a rate almost four times that of regular hospitals for serious violations of Medicarerules, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Other long-term care hospitals were cited at a rate about twice that of regular hospitals.

Read the full story here on the New York Times website.

Republicans will seek amendments to parts of the Democrat's healthcare reform they oppose, rather than push for an alternative plan to overhaul the $2.5 trillion system, a key senator said Monday.

Conservatives are seeking changes that would limit medical malpractice liability and do away with any requirement for consumers to buy a health insurance policy, said Sen. Charles Grassley, speaking at the Reuters Washington Summit.

He would also like to enable consumers to purchase insurance policies across state lines. Insurance is currently regulated at the state level, with consumers unable to purchase from firms that do not sell plans in their state.

"I just hope that we're able to keep this bill from getting any worse,'' said Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee.

Read the full story here on the Insurance Journal website.

Reversing a downward trend, the frequency of medical malpractice claims against hospitals is rising, an insurance brokerage and risk management group has found.

The information, that claims are expected to continue increasing at a one percent annual rate, after a decade of decrease, was contained in a report released today by Aon Corporation and the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management (ASHRM).

Aon and ASHRM said more than 100 health care organizations representing over 1,500 facilities ranging from small community hospitals to large multi-state health care systems provided loss and exposure data for the study.

It found that one out of every four claims and 24 percent of hospital professional liability costs are associated with hospital acquired conditions such as infections and injuries, medication errors, objects left in surgery and pressure ulcers.

Medical malpractice insurance trade groups said they are gearing up to fight a proposal to cancel the antitrust exemption they are now afforded under the McCarran-Ferguson Act.

The Senate Democratic leader ship has said they will seek the change for medical practice insurers along with a repeal of the exemption for health insurers.

Lawrence E. Smarr, president of the Physician Insurers Association of America, based in Rockville, Md., said comments by President Obama supporting repeal in his weekly address this Saturday are confirmation of the industry’s view that the Senate plans to act on the measure.

“And they’re earning these profits and bonuses while enjoying a privileged exception from our antitrust laws—a matter that Congress is rightfully reviewing,” he added.

Mr. Smarr noted comments made in testimony last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., concerning legislation that would repeal the exemption.

Emergency room doctors make rapid-fire, life-or-death decisions in a chaotic environment, often without knowing the medical histories of their patients.

The Georgia Supreme Court’s justices were reminded of that Tuesday by lawyers defending a key provision of the state’s tort reform law. It requires a plaintiff to establish by “clear and convincing evidence” that an ER doctor committed “gross negligence” — an almost insurmountable legal threshold — to prove medical malpractice.

The case in question involves a woman who went to the ER in Columbus complaining of serious pain behind her eye; she says a doctor sent her away with a prescription and failed to diagnose her real, disabling illness.

The Legislature passed the tort reform law in 2005. With ER doctors facing an increased threat of malpractice suits, lawmakers sought to make sure Georgia could still attract the best physicians into the state’s emergency rooms, Wade Copeland, a lawyer representing a Muscogee County doctor, told the court.

But Atlanta lawyer Michael Terry said lawmakers improperly carved out a radical exception for hospitals and insurance companies that lobbied for it at the expense of those injured by medical negligence.

“It’s the practical elimination of any [medical malpractice] claims,” Terry told the justices. The provision gives hospitals and ER physicians “an unconscionable and inequitable advantage.”

MAG Mutual, which insures most of Georgia’s doctors, has seen a significant reduction in the number of malpractice lawsuits against emergency room physicians because of the law, the company’s president, Darrell Grimes, said Tuesday. Grimes noted that the cost of insurance premiums also has fallen.

Read the full story here on the Atlanta Journal Constitution Website.

Eliminating defensive medicine could save upwards of $200 billion in health-care costs annually, according to estimates by the American Medical Association and others. The cure is a reliable medical malpractice system that patients, doctors and the general public can trust.

But this is the one reform Washington will not seriously consider. That's because the trial lawyers, among the largest contributors to the Democratic Party, thrive on the unreliable justice system we have now.

Almost all the other groups with a stake in health reform—including patient safety experts, physicians, the AARP, the Chamber of Commerce, schools of public health—support pilot projects such as special health courts that would move beyond today's hyper-adversarial malpractice lawsuit system to a court that would quickly and reliably distinguish between good and bad care. The support for some kind of reform reflects a growing awareness among these groups that managing health care sensibly, including containing costs, is almost impossible when doctors go through the day thinking about how to protect themselves from lawsuits.

Read the full editorial, written by Philip K. Howard, here on the Wall Street Journal website.

Wayne Volkmuth learned what a "250 case" was while conducting research shortly after the loss of his 7-year-old son, Ryan, who died three years ago during a dental procedure at a Palo Alto clinic.

The "250" refers to $250,000, the most Volkmuth could recover in a medical malpractice claim over his disabled son's death, a limit set 34 years ago by California's landmark medical malpractice law. It's also the reason his case was turned down by most of the dozen medical malpractice attorneys he and his wife consulted.

"They basically said we can't do this. They said we believe you have a strong case and we could prevail at trial, but in economic terms it makes no sense for us to take it on," said Volkmuth of Foster City, who eventually found an attorney to sue the clinic and its staff for wrongful death and negligence. The case is set to go to trial Oct. 26.

Medical malpractice reform is getting its moment in the spotlight during the ongoing debate to overhaul the country's health care system.

Read this full article here on the San Francisco Gate website.

Malpractice reform has always been a resoundingly popular idea with Republicans, which made the topic a perfect one for President Barack Obama to talk about in his recent address to Congress. George W. Bush had a "good idea" on malpractice reform, the President said--one he intended to pursue as part of a health-care overhaul. Cue a rare moment of bipartisan applause.

Both sides agree that current malpractice law--under which doctors pay as much as $200,000 a year for liability insurance--is often unfair and inefficient. But when it comes to fixing the system, consensus is not so simple. Democrats oppose a federal cap on "noneconomic damages" in malpractice cases--money awarded for pain and suffering--that Republicans and doctors want. Supporters call the caps, already in place in some states, a quick and easy way to reduce malpractice-insurance premiums. An obstetrician in Texas, where such damages are capped, could pay 20% of what a colleague is charged in Florida, where awards are unlimited.

Read the full story here on the TIME Magazine website.

President Barack Obama tapped into a large vein of public support when he suggested recently that he is open to reforming medical malpractice laws. It's common currency in the U.S. that litigation drives medical inflation by forcing doctors and hospitals to resort to "defensive medicine," overtreating patients to avoid lawsuits.

The evidence suggests a much smaller effect. Study after study shows that costs associated with malpractice lawsuits make up 1% to 2% of the nation's $2.5 trillion annual health-care bill and that tort reform would barely make a dent in the total.

A comprehensive new report from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, using a database of employer-sponsored health plans covering 10 million Americans, looked at the impact of tort reform measures already enacted in more than 30 states. The authors concluded that comprehensive, nationwide reforms would lower overall health-care costs by 2.3% at most. "That's significant, of course, but still fairly small," says Kellogg professor Leemore S. Dafny, a co-author of the study. As President Obama told a joint session of Congress on Sept. 9: "I don't believe malpractice reform is a silver bullet."

Doctors see things differently. They pay malpractice premiums that can run up to $250,000 a year for specialties such as neurology or obstetrics. It's "a huge issue for us," says Dr. Steven M. Safyer, CEO of Montefiore Medical Center in New York. "I would say about 5% of our costs are directly attributable to malpractice premiums and another 5% to defensive medicine."

Read the full story here on the BusinessWeek website.

The White House took the first steps on Thursday toward setting up demonstration projects intended to explore solutions to a problem that many doctors say is driving up health care costs: exorbitant malpractice claims and sky-high premiums for liability insurance.

President Obama directed the Department of Health and Human Services to announce within 30 days that it would begin accepting proposals from states, localities and various health organizations for  demonstration projects that would improve patient safety and doctor-patient communication, ensure timely payments to injured patients, and reduce insurance liability premiums for providers. The department intends to give out a total of $25 million, in grants of up to $3 million each, for projects that could run as long as three years.

Read the full story here on the New York Times website.

Attorneys for a woman who was awarded more than a million dollars after she received a botched face lift asked Georgia's top court on Tuesday to overturn a state law that caps damages in medical malpractice lawsuits at $350,000.

The case centers on a Georgia tort reform law passed in 2005 that caps the amount a jury can award for malpractice victims' pain and suffering. The laws were an attempt by lawmakers to ease the high malpractice insurance costs linked to large payoffs.

On Tuesday, attorneys debated before the Georgia Supreme Court whether the Legislature setting the limit overstepped their bounds.

Attorneys for Betty Nestlehutt, who was awarded more than $1.2 million after a 2006 facelift despite the law, said the law overturns a jury's centuries-old right to determine how much to compensate a victim. Nestlehutt was a real estate agent who wanted to improve her face to better compete with younger agents, according to her attorneys.

Read the full story here on the Ledger-Enquirer website.

The UC Board of Regents has quietly settled a dozen lawsuits stemming from fertility fraud uncovered nearly 15 years ago -- drawing closer to an end a scandal that has dogged UC Irvine and left behind dozens of heartbroken couples.

Shirel and Steve Crawford recently deposited their $675,000 settlement, minus legal fees, but it brought them little peace. In the late 1980s, in the midst of what many consider the country's worst fertility scandal, the Crawfords believe their embryos were given to a woman referred to in documents as "Mrs. S." Mrs. S gave birth to a boy and a girl in two separate pregnancies while Shirel Crawford -- out of money and embryos -- never had a baby.

"I don't think it will ever be over," Shirel Crawford said. "Our children are still out there somewhere. Maybe someday they will find us."

The Crawfords' case was among a dozen settled in recent months for a total of $4.23 million. The payments ranged from $45,000 to the Crawfords' $675,000. In all, the University of California has paid out more than $24 million for 137 separate incidents in which eggs or embryos were either unaccounted for or given to other women without consent. Three cases are still pending.

Read the full article here on the Los Angeles Times website.

A new nationwide poll reveals that a strong majority of America’s voters want Congress to include lawsuit reform in any overhaul of the health care system. The survey found that:

83 percent of the nation’s electorate want Congress to address reform of the medical malpractice system as part of any health care reform plan.

72 percent of voters think the fear of being sued often changes the way doctors deal with patients.

67 percent of voters favor special health courts deciding medical malpractice cases rather than the regular court system.

Only 43 percent of Americans have confidence that a lawsuit “without merit” that was filed against them would be resolved in their favor, and only 30 percent have confidence it would be resolved quickly and efficiently.

The poll was conducted by Clarus Research Group for Common Good, a nonpartisan legal reform coalition, and the Committee for Economic Development (CED). It was conducted via live telephone interviews August 14-18, 2009, with a sample of 1,003 registered voters and a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percent.

See the full survey results here on the Philip K. Howard website.

When a patient shows up at a doctor's office with a bruise after falling and bumping his head, the physician might order a CT scan even if she believes the injury is superficial.

Worries about a malpractice lawsuit might prompt her to take steps that aren't medically necessary. "If I don't get a CAT scan, this is that one case where I'll end up in court," the doctor might think, says Cecil Wilson, a physician who is president-elect of the American Medical Association.

This is defensive medicine -- a careful, fretful approach to treating patients, in which doctors authorize tests in part to reduce the risk that they will be sued. In the national debate over health care, doctors and policy makers often point to spending on defensive medicine as a key driver of soaring costs.

Calculating how much defensive medicine actually costs is extremely difficult, because medical professionals often have many motivations for ordering tests and other procedures. The U.S. spends a higher percentage of its gross domestic product on health care than any other nation in the industrialized world. Legal expenses contribute to the bill.

Read the full story here on the Wall Street Journal website.

The smell of death was overpowering the moment a relief worker cracked open one of the hospital chapel’s wooden doors. Inside, more than a dozen bodies lay motionless on low cots and on the ground, shrouded in white sheets. Here, a wisp of gray hair peeked out. There, a knee was flung akimbo. A pallid hand reached across a blue gown.

Within days, the grisly tableau became the focus of an investigation into what happened when the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina marooned Memorial Medical Center in Uptown New Orleans. The hurricane knocked out power and running water and sent the temperatures inside above 100 degrees. Still, investigators were surprised at the number of bodies in the makeshift morgue and were stunned when health care workers charged that a well-regarded doctor and two respected nurses had hastened the deaths of some patients by injecting them with lethal doses of drugs. Mortuary workers eventually carried 45 corpses from Memorial, more than from any comparable-size hospital in the drowned city.

Read the full story here on the New York Times website.

Two teenage sisters have been awarded $11 million in a malpractice lawsuit against a prominent Saranac Lake pediatrician who failed to take steps to prevent the girls from being repeatedly sexually assaulted by their half-brother when they were children in Lake Placid.
    
An eight-member jury in U.S. District Court ruled against Dr. Patricia Monroe and her workplace, Adirondack Internal Medicine and Pediatric, ending a federal case rooted in horrific abuse dating back more than nine years.

The older sister, now 18, will receive $6 million, the 16-year-old younger sister $5 million, according to a news release issued by Albany attorneys Pamela Nichols and Stephen Coffey, who represented the victims. He noted they were "never offered a dime" to the settle the case, which dates to 2002.

The news release said the jury of four men and four women found Monroe and her medical group were "negligent in their care and treatment of the children when they failed to take the proper measures to investigate a situation which would have prevented the girls from being sexually assaulted by their half brother."

Read the full story here on the TimesUnion website.

When 18-month-old Kaelyn Sosa suffered a bump on the head in a fall at home, her mother took her to the emergency room to make sure it wasn't serious. While Kaelyn was under sedation in an MRI machine, her breathing tube was dislodged, cutting off her oxygen and causing a crippling brain injury.

As often happens after medical accidents, the facility, Baptist Children's Hospital in Miami, settled with the Sosa family for an undisclosed sum. But the hospital went further. Administrators analyzed the chain of events that led to the tragedy. They put in place new measures aimed at preventing the mistakes that injured Kaelyn from recurring and to better respond when something does go wrong. The hospital then engaged the child's parents in educational efforts to underline to medical staff the critical importance of patient safety.

Now Sandy Sosa, Kaelyn's mother, serves as a community liaison on the hospital's quality-and-patient-safety committee. "We wanted something good to come out of what happened to our daughter," she says.

Read the full story here on the Wall Street Journal website.

With an asthmatic 4-year-old boy at home and a sick father a world away in Australia, she had no room in her life for osteoporosis or early menopause. It was 20 years ago, and when her gynecologist suggested hormone replacement therapy to stave off the effects of aging, she agreed.

"I was having these awful hot flashes," the 62-year-old recalls. "I found it really hard to deal with. There was a lot of stress in my life."

It's a moment she is revisiting now, with news that the company behind her treatment used ghostwriters to promote HRT in academic journals and play down any health threats, including breast cancer and stroke.

Last month, Smith, who was on HRT for 13 years, was told she has breast cancer.

"The hardest part was telling my son," she says, adding that her boy, now living in British Columbia, flew home immediately.

Read the full article here on the HealthZone.CA website.

Gov. David Paterson has signed legislation to freeze medical malpractice insurance rates in New York for another year, but the state's largest insurer said it leaves the company financially weaker while efforts to resolve malpractice issues are stalled.

Dr. Robert Menotti, president of Medical Liability Mutual Insurance Co., said the measure positions it to lose $55 million from a $275 million surplus, already diminished by past rate freezes.

Paterson signed the freeze for the second straight year. He said last year that the freeze enabled doctors to keep providing care "without getting suffocated by more back-breaking fiscal burdens," while work continued on long-term solutions. Legislative negotiations are continuing.

Read the full story here on the San Francisco Examiner website.

A blog posting discussing how liability reform might be a better target in the overall cost of health insurance.

Click here to read the entry from the Heritage Foundation website.

It’s widely estimated that 30% of U.S. health-care spending—some $700 billion a year—is spent on tests, treatments and procedures that provide no value. But one man’s waste may be another’s life-saving treatment. And there are hundreds of medical quandaries with no clear answers.

As lawmakers battle over how to expand coverage for more Americans and how to pay for it, an equally contentious issue is looming: Many experts, doctors and politicians want to revamp the U.S. health-care system to reward the quality of care.

Read this full story on the Wall Street Journal website.

A hospital that quietly chartered a plane and sent a seriously brain injured illegal immigrant back to Guatemala over the objections of his family and legal guardian did not act unreasonably, a jury ruled Monday.

Health care and immigration experts across the United States have closely watched the court case in the sleepy coastal town of Stuart. They say it underscores the dilemma facing hospitals with patients who require long-term care, are unable to pay and don't qualify for federal or state aid because of their immigration status.

Deputy Court Clerk Carol Harper said the unanimous 6-member jury found in favour of the hospital.

Read the full story here on the Yahoo! News website.

All she wanted was a behind like the one Rosanna Roces had, as advertised in the Belo ad. She got a lot more than what she asked for, literally—and a world of pain, besides.

Josefina Norcio has left St. Luke’s Hospital after doing a two-month stretch, with a lot less money and probably a whole new perspective on the promises of instant beauty made by cosmetic surgeons. Now Norcio wants payback for her pain, suffering and expenses from Dr. Vicki Belo and two doctors formerly associated with Belo’s high-profile, celebrity-endorsed nip-and-tuck clinic.

Norcio is the businesswoman who paid P305,000 to the doctors at the Belo Medical Group for a buttocks augmentation procedure that went horribly wrong. She landed in St. Luke’s Hospital when her butt swelled to nearly thrice its original size after the ministrations of two Belo doctors, Dr. Ronaldo Cayetano and Dr. Francis Decangchon, in 2003 and 2005.

Read the full story here on the Manila Standard website.

Containing health-care costs is impossible under the current legal structure. That fact has to be addressed if President Barack Obama is to create an affordable health-care system that is accessible to everyone.

Every incentive in the system now is to do more -- that's how doctors get paid and that's how doctors get protected from lawsuits. Billions of dollars are wasted in "defensive medicine." Bureaucracy built up over decades diverts resources from patient care to mindless compliance. Forms are everywhere.

The only path to affordable health care is a basic overhaul to realign incentives. The new ideas are out there -- for example, creating a reimbursement model that rewards effective care, and restoring trust in the reliability of justice by creating special health courts.

Read the rest of the OpEd piece here on the Wall Street Journal website.

The swine flu pandemic has grown "unstoppable" and all nations will need access to vaccines, a WHO official has said, as 12 new deaths were reported and a study raised fresh concerns.

Britain, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, the Philippines and Thailand all reported deaths on Monday, while Saudi Arabia shut an international school after 20 students were diagnosed with the A(H1N1) virus.

As the death toll increased, the World Health Organisation official said a swine flu vaccine should be available as early as September and all countries would need to be able to protect themselves.

Read the full story here on the Yahoo! News website.

Our medical liability system needs reform. But anyone who thinks that limiting liability would reduce health care costs is fooling himself. Preventable medical injuries, not patient compensation, are what ring up extra costs for additional treatment. This means taxpayers, employers and everyone else who buys health insurance — all of us — have a big stake in patient safety.

Read this op-ed piece by PLUS contributer and presenter Tom Baker here on the New York Times website.

Too many people die needlessly at U.S. hospitals, according to a sweeping new Medicare analysis showing wide variation in death rates between the best hospitals and the worst.

The analysis examined death rates for heart attacks, heart failure and pneumonia at more than 4,600 hospitals across the USA. At 5.9% of hospitals, patients with pneumonia died at rates significantly higher than the national average. With heart failure, 3.4% of hospitals had death rates higher than the average, and 1.2% of hospitals were higher when it came to heart attack.

Researchers also found that the majority of U.S. hospitals operate the equivalent of revolving doors for their patients. One of every four heart failure patients and slightly less than one in five heart attack and pneumonia patients land back in the hospital within 30 days, data show.

Read this full story here on the USA Today website.

In his recent speech to the American Medical Association, President Barack Obama held out the tantalizing possibility of reforming medical malpractice law as part of a comprehensive overhaul of the U.S. health-care system. As usual, he hedged his bets by declining to endorse the only medical malpractice reform with real bite -- a national cap on damages for pain and suffering, such as the ones enacted in more than 30 states.

These caps are usually set between $250,000 to $500,000, and they can make a substantial difference. Other reforms, such as rules that limit contingency fees, shorten statutes of limitation, or confine each defendant's tort exposure to his proportionate share of the harm, have small and uncertain effects.

Medical malpractice, of course, is not just an American issue. And now that the U.S. is considering universal health-care systems similar to those found elsewhere, it's worth a quick peek at their medical malpractice systems -- which usually attract far less controversy, and are far less expensive, than our own.

Read the full story here on The Wall Street Journal website.

The American Medical Association has long battled Democrats who oppose protecting doctors from malpractice lawsuits. But during a private meeting at the White House last month, association officials said, they found one Democrat willing to entertain the idea: President Obama.

In closed-door talks, Mr. Obama has been making the case that reducing malpractice lawsuits — a goal of many doctors and Republicans — can help drive down health care costs, and should be considered as part of any health care overhaul, according to lawmakers of both parties, as well as A.M.A.

Read the full story here on the New York Times website.

Robert and Paea Olah allege their daughter suffered brain damage during delivery because of negligence by osteopathic physician Ronald Baird, who denies the allegation and who refuses to grant permission to his insurer to settle the claim out of court.

However, a bankruptcy filing by Baird and the ruling by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver could bring a resolution to the litigation. The court said the "right to settle" is an asset and the trustee in the bankruptcy case has the option of "selling" that right to the Olahs.

And if they obtain the right to settle, the Olahs can submit their claim for $1 million to the doctor's insurance company for a fair evaluation, according to their attorney, Ruth Lybbert.

Read the full story here on the Salt Lake Tribune website.

That's a nice headline for a Wednesday.  This article, an Advisen MSCAd featured case written by John W. Molka III, gives detail to a case where the lawsuit and award comes from the negligent handling of a corpse.  Most HPL policies define medical professional services to include postmortem handling.

You can read the full story here on Advisen.

In looking at medical professional liability financial results, some people might say that pigs are indeed airborne.

Many industry observers expect overall 2008 property-casualty underwriting and investment performance to reflect significantly deteriorating results— separately and combined. In fact, insurance analysts at A.M. Best expect something approaching a 10 percent decline in surplus.

For its part, the medical professional liability line should be expected to share in some aspects of the deteriorating investment results, but early signals are that expectations for deteriorating underwriting results may not be realized.

It may seem odd to discuss medical professional liability as though it could have its own underwriting and investment results but, in substantial measure, it can. Because so much of the coverage is provided by companies that specialize in the business or by captives and self-insured programs, we can review both of these drivers of financial outcomes—something that can’t be done easily for most other lines of business.

Read this full article here on the National Underwriter website.

Like Starbucks, medical spas have become ubiquitous throughout California and the U.S. Also called “Medi-Spas,” they combine traditional spa treatments with medical procedures such as Botox and laser hair and tattoo removal. They should not be confused with day spas, which only offer facials, massages and body wraps.

Hundreds of thousands of women are the primary patrons of “Medi-Spas” and they could be at risk. Although a number of Medi-Spas are regulated by state legislation that requires on-site physician supervision, that is not the case in California, according to attorney Stephanie Berman Schneider, a partner with Berman, Berman & Berman, LLP who specializes in representing medical spas and medical professionals.

In California in 2006, a laser bill which would have required on-site physician supervision while lasers were being used or the ability for the physician to arrive on the premises within one (1) hour if needed was amended and became a “study” bill. It never went anywhere.

In 2008, California re-introduced legislation (Assembly Bill 2398) which would have required physicians to be on-site, provide direct supervision of delegated procedures and good faith exams on all patients prior to delegation. The legislation also would have prohibited the corporate ownership of medical spas and established extreme penalties for non-physician corporate owned entities or management companies.

Read the full story here on the Advisen website.

2009 PLUS Medical PL Symposium Industry Overview from Scott Billey on Vimeo.

Medical malpractice overhauls have died many deaths in Congress over the years, often at the hands of Democratic lawmakers backed by trial lawyers. Attempts to change the system may be getting new life.

As they search for savings to redo the nation's $2.4 trillion health system, key congressional Democrats and administration officials, from President Barack Obama on down, are indicating they're open to changing a system that's a burden for doctors but a boon to attorneys and some victims of medical error.

"The cost issue is the thing that we actually think is the big driver in this whole debate,'' Obama told business leaders last week.

The Oklahoma House Wednesday passed legislation that makes sweeping changes to the state’s civil justice system which supporters said will help stop frivolous lawsuits and lower the price companies and doctors pay for liability insurance.

Largely along party lines, the House voted 61-39 for the measure that is the centerpiece of the Republican legislative agenda. It now goes to the state Senate, where it has the support of the chamber’s GOP majority.

Registration is now available for the 2009 PLUS Medical PL Symposium.  You can register by clicking on the link at the bottom of this page.

In our 9th year, this Symposium is designed to address new and significant issues affecting the legal, medical and insurance marketplace.

Please click here for more information about the program.

In addition to the fine educational sessions, individuals involved in the various aspects of Medical Professional Liability will enjoy a networking reception with others involved in the industry as well as a luncheon with Keynote Address by Paul H. Keckley titled Disruptive Innovation & Healthcare Reform: What's Ahead?

Paul H. Keckley, Ph.D., Executive Director, Deloitte Center for Health Solutions

Lodging is available at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers.  To reserve your room, please call them at 312-464-1000 and ask for the PLUS rate of $215. 

A jury awarded $2.5 million in medical malpractice damages to the family of a Nevada woman who died at age 27 after doctors failed to diagnose her cancer.

Officials called it the largest medical malpractice award in Clark County, Nev., District Court since 2004, when Nevada lawmakers capped malpractice awards for pain and suffering at $350,000.

In a bad faith claim arising from a medical malpractice action, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit imposed a 1:1 ratio between compensatory and punitive damages in its ruling issued on December 24, 2008.

Jurinko v. The Medical Protective Co., Nos. 06-3519 & 06-3666, 2008 U.S. App. LEXIS 26263 (December 24, 2008). The bad faith claim against The Medical Protective Company ("Medical Protective") was based upon its conduct in an underlying medical malpractice action venued in state court in Pennsylvania brought by plaintiffs Stephen and Cynthia Jurinko ("the Jurinkos") against Stephen Jurinko's treating physician Dr. Paul Marcincin, the pathologist who read Mr. Jurinko's pathology slides and the company who employed the pathologist for failure to diagnose cancer.

The Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas jury rendered a $2.5 million verdict against Medical Protective's insured, which was $1.3 million more than defendant Dr. Marcincin's coverage. Dr. Marcincin settled with the Jurinkos for his policy limits of $1.2 million and an assignment of his insurance bad faith claim against Medical Protective. Dr. Marcincin's policy limit consisted of a $200,000 primary policy and $1 million from a catastrophic loss fund, which was an excess insurer.

Read the full article here on the Duane Morris website.

A name-brand prescription drug manufacturer can be held liable for injuries caused by the generic version of the drug made by another manufacturer, a California appellate court has ruled.

The ruling, which allows a lawsuit against Madison, N.J.-based Wyeth Inc. to go to trial, is the opposite of numerous other decisions on the issue and could create liability concerns for brand drug manufacturers if upheld, attorneys say.

According to Steve Forbes and other tort reformers, the medical malpractice crisis is the fault of greedy plaintiffs and rapacious lawyers. The solution: caps on noneconomic damages. Since California adopted a $250,000 cap in 1975, 23 states have followed suit.

What are the real-world consequences of such caps? The elderly, the poor, the unemployed and their surviving families are getting hurt in disproportionate numbers. Many deserving victims of medical malpractice can't even find a lawyer to represent them. Any suit that might require extensive discovery, the testimony of high-priced experts or protracted court proceedings can't get off the ground.

Read the full story here on the Forbes.Com website.

The state Medical Association says the number of medical malpractice lawsuits against West Virginia doctors and hospitals is going back up.

But recent claims are still below the totals reported earlier this decade, before legislative reforms went into effect.

According to the association, 315 medical malpractice lawsuits were filed in 2003. There were 130 in 2004 and 174 last year. Through July of this year, 75 were filed.

Executive Director Evan Jenkins says West Virginia has gone from one of the worst states in terms of its medical liability climate to one of the best.

Reforms approved in 2001 and 2003 included capping damage awards and limiting a doctor’s or hospital’s share of a damage award to the percentage of blame assigned by a jury.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, by 2030 the number of Americans aged 65 and older will more than double to 71 million, comprising approximately 20 percent of the U.S. population. With an aging population boom, Prudential Financial, Inc.'s

newly issued 2008 Long-Term Care Cost of Care research report is a valuable resource for consumers seeking information to help them make informed decisions about their long-term care needs. The study found an increase in the average cost of long-term care ranging from 5% to 13%, varying by type of service, in the past two years alone.

"Many Americans mistakenly believe that Medicare or private health insurance will pay for their long-term care needs. The reality is long-term care risk is substantial, and under current Medicare and Medicaid policy, much of it is the uninsured private responsibility of individuals who pay for care and of families who care for their relatives," said Andy Mako, Senior Vice President, Long-Term Care Insurance, Prudential.

Prudential's Cost of Care study sheds light on the State-specific average costs associated with nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and home health care services. The study results show the average assisted living costs and average nursing home costs in Alaska as the most expensive in the country at $82,956 per year and $183,595 per year respectively. Detroit ranked the highest for home health care hourly rate at $38.

A former Amesbury woman who wanted to stop having to take heart medications so she could have another child, only to end up with permanent heart damage, has won a $4.3 million verdict in a lawsuit against two Boston doctors.

With interest, the total amount will be more than $6 million, said Denyse (Gonthier) Richter's lawyer, Annette Gonthier-Kiely of Salem, who is also Richter's sister. It's one of the larger jury awards in a medical malpractice case in recent history. The jury returned its verdict Wednesday in Suffolk Superior Court.

Richter was a 39-year-old mother of three who wanted to have a fourth child when, in 2002, she saw Dr. Laurence Epstein, chief of the arrhythmia service at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Epstein was a noted specialist in a procedure that used radio frequency catheter ablations — using high-frequency radio waves to burn away abnormal cells that were causing the arrhythmia.

Read the full story here on the Newbury Port News website.

Nevada regulators on Friday decided to post more information about doctors' malpractice history on the state Board of Medical Examiners Web site.

The unanimous decision comes after a hepatitis C outbreak in southern Nevada drew focus on the Board of Medical Examiners' operations. The outbreak spurred criticism of the way the board distributes information about the doctors it licenses and censures.

The current Web site lists the names of doctors who've been disciplined and the nature of the infraction. Members of the public must contact the board for additional information.

Read the full story here on the SanDiego Union Tribune website.

An Aon Corp. analysis of liability in the long term care industry found for the first time in nine years of reporting that liability costs are stable on a national average basis.

The study found that average general liability and professional liability loss costs nationwide are at approximately $1,460 per bed after peaking at $2,030 per bed in 1998. This trend is driven by a reduction in the average severity of claims from a high of $261,000 in 1998 to $138,000 in 2007.

An insurance trade group said they expect an appeal of a Georgia trial judge’s ruling last week that found the state law capping awards for pain and suffering in medical malpractice cases was unconstitutional.

The American Insurance Association said the ruling, handed down by Fulton Count Court Judge Marvin S. Arrington Sr. in Atlanta on April 28, which found the cap on non-economic damages in medical liability cases to be illegal, dealt “a potentially serious blow to Georgia’s 2005 comprehensive tort reform law.”

Read the full article, authored by Daniel Hays, here on the National Underwriter website.

Hospital Corporation of America has agreed to settle 11 lawsuits that accuse a former West Virginia physician of harming patients, a lawyer for the plaintiffs said.

The lawsuits were filed by former patients and their families against Dr. John A. King, HCA and the former Putnam General Hospital, where King practiced from November 2002 to June 2003.

Illinois doctors will get a refund collectively worth $11 million from the state's largest medical malpractice insurer.

The Illinois State Medical Insurance Exchange says claims are down. That means doctors will get credits when they renew their policies. Individual doctors will get around $500 to $1,000.

Read the full article here on the KWQC TV6 Website.

Risk management practices have become critical to health care facilities attempting to reduce liability, and medical provider risk managers wrestling with advances in technology and heightened patient expectations are trying to ensure their programs don't fall by the wayside, experts say.

"Risk management has come to the forefront in the last 10 years," said Paul Greve, senior vp in the health care practice of Willis Group Holdings Ltd. in Nashville. He participated in a session at the Professional Liability Underwriting Society's Medical Professional Liability Symposium March 11-12 in Chicago.

Read the full article here on BusinessInsurance.Com.

The Mississippi Supreme Court will consider a federal appeals panel's request to clarify when the clock starts ticking on the filing of certain medical malpractice claims.

Specifically, the Mississippi court has been asked to clarify how the statute of limitations applies in circumstances "where the alleged negligence is either the administration of a drug by a physician or the physician's failure to disclose about the risks of a drug, and experts disagree as to whether the drug caused the plaintiff's injuries." In 2006, the 5th Circuit overturned a medical malpractice verdict for Barbara Huss, who had sued a Memphis, Tenn., clinic over medical treatment provided during her pregnancy. Huss lives in Mississippi and filed her lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Oxford.

Read the full article here on the CNBC website.

Looking forward to the 2008 PLUS Medical PL Symposium March 11 & 12 in Chicago, we are posting this clip from the 2007 PLUS International Conference held in November in Washington, DC.

In it, panel moderator Angela Williams Russell talks with Charles Citrin, MD,  Susan Durbin Kinter and Joshua Stein about the newer technology of telemedicine, the inherent risks involved, and how to underwrite these risks.

The Iowa Supreme Court has sent two medical malpractice cases back to district court after offering a new opinion on how the statute of limitations can be interpreted. They ruled that the statute of limitations two year window should begin when patients know the extent and cause of their illness or injury, not necessarily when their symptoms are initially diagnosed.

Motivated by mounting medical costs, lawmakers and executives are urging doctors to embrace a seemingly simple way to save billions of dollars a year: prescribe medications online. Officials in the public and private sectors say electronic prescriptions will make transactions more efficient, reduce medication errors and entice doctors to prescribe less expensive drugs.

Although there has been some pushback by physicians who have been working in the industry for a while, however the up and coming practitioners are doing much of this work on-line in medical school.

Read the full article here on Yahoo! News.

According to the Stamford Advocate, a jury ruled that an obstetrician must pay $38.5 million to the family of a baby born with cerebral palsy.

Details of the circumstances surrounding the award can be found here on the Stamford Advocate Web Site.

As reported in National Underwriter Life & Health, the US Treasury Department and two of its offshoots have recommended that life insurers check to be sure that they have enough capital to pay claims during a severe influenza epidemic.