Medical Malpractice: Impact of the Crisis and Effect of State Tort Reforms

Reviews research on the malpractice crisis and examines data on how volatile malpractice environments affect healthcare delivery and how state tort reforms affect premiums, frequency of claims, payouts, and physician supply. Considers policy implications

Understanding Medical Malpractice Insurance: A Primer

Analyzes the causes of and potential solutions to address malpractice crises, and discusses how medical malpractice insurance works, why premiums change, and what can be done about it

Empirical Health Law Scholarship: The State of the Field

The last three decades have seen the blossoming of the fields of health law and empirical legal studies and their intersection--empirical scholarship in health law and policy. Researchers in legal academia and other settings have conducted hundreds of studies using data to estimate the effects of health law on accident rates, health outcomes, health care utilization, and costs, as well as other outcome variables. Yet the emerging field of empirical health law faces significant challenges--practical, methodological, and political. The purpose of this Article is to survey the current state of the field by describing commonly used methods, analyzing enabling and inhibiting factors in the production and uptake of this type of research by policymakers, and suggesting ways to increase the production and impact of empirical health law studies. In some areas of inquiry, high-quality research has been conducted, and the findings have been successfully imported into policy debates and used to inform evidence-based lawmaking. In other areas, the level of rigor has been uneven, and the best evidence has not translated effectively into sound policy. Despite challenges and historical shortcomings, empirical health law studies can and should have a substantial impact on regulations designed to improve public safety, increase both access to and quality of health care, and foster technological innovation

Administrative Compensation for Medical Injuries: Lessons From Three Foreign Systems

Examines "no-fault" systems in New Zealand, Sweden, and Denmark, in which patients injured by medical negligence can file for compensation through governmental or private adjudicating organizations. Considers lessons for U.S. medical malpractice reform

Rationalizing Noneconomic Damages: A Health-Utilities Approach

Studdert et al examine why making compensation of noneconomic damages in personal-injury litigation more rational and predictable is socially valuable. Noneconomic-damages schedules as an alternative to caps are discussed, several potential approaches to construction of schedules are reviewed, and the use of a health-utilities approach as the most promising model is argued. An empirical analysis that combines health-utilities data created in a previous study with original empirical work is used to demonstrate how key steps in construction of a health-utilities-based schedule for noneconomic damages might proceed