Medical Malpractice Compensation Reform

Tort reform legislation is a topic that has been discussed and studied heavily in the states of Texas and California. This is because it has been claimed that these states have had success in bringing more doctors into the states. This thesis studies those states, as well as the state of Arkansas. It examines Arkansas because tort reform legislation was an issue brought up in the most recent election in November 2018 in that state. Although Arkansas’ tort reform ballot measure was removed from the ballot by the Supreme Court of Arkansas, a similar measure could still be brought forth in coming years. The analysis in this thesis finds that tort reform legislation is successful in meeting its goals in some ways, but not in others. Despite the assertions of supporters of tort reform measures, tort reform legislation does not prevent a state from seeing its doctors leaving the state. Tort reform legislation does, however, lead to fewer medical malpractice payouts in a state

The Effect of Tort Reform on Tort Case Filings

Does so-called tort reform decrease tort case filings? In Texas and other states that have enacted numerous rounds of tort reform, the answer appears to be a resounding yes, at least as of the year 2000. More recent evidence from Oklahoma supports that conclusion and provides an interesting case study within the tort reform juggernaut. During at least the past twenty years, tort reformers have achieved substantial legislative successes and, some would argue, public relations victories. Yet their desire for more reform seems insatiable, and their legislative agenda rarely sleeps. Tort reform bills bloom perennially in the Oklahoma legislature, and numerous significant changes in liability rules, restrictions on remedies, and procedural innovations were enacted in 2002, 2003, and 2004. Despite their apparent success, tort reformers spun these victories as losses and vowed to press on. One omnibus tort reform bill passed by the legislature in 2007 was immediately vetoed by the governor. Its supporters, apparently undeterred, resurrected most of the provisions from the defeated 2007 bill and reintroduced them in 2008. One might reasonably ask whether anyone has stopped to see what, if anything, the enacted reforms have already wrought, before advocating even more sweeping changes. This article will make a small contribution toward answering that question

Losers and Losers: Some Demographics of Medical Malpractice Tort Reforms

Our research examines individual differences in the effects of medical malpractice tort reforms on pre-trial settlement speed and settlement amounts by age and most likely settlement size. Findings of note include that, unlike previously assumed, both absolute and percentage losses from tort reform are small for infants in an asset value sense and that the prime-aged working population is the group most negatively affected by tort reform. Maximum entropy quantile regressions highlight the robustness of our conclusions and reveal that the settlement losses most informative for policy evaluation differ greatly from mean regression estimates.medical malpractice, tort reform, Texas closed claims, damage caps, quantile regression, maximum entropy

Book Review: Deforming Tort Reform

The storms buffeting the tort system over the past two decades have come in three distinct waves. In the late 1960s, steep increases in the insurance costs incurred by health care providers protecting against negligence claims by patients triggered what came to be known as the medical malpractice crisis. In the mid-1970s, manufacturers whose liability insurance premiums suddenly soared raised obstreperous complaints that called public attention to the existence of a product liability crisis. Finally, other groups whose activities created risks exposing them to lawsuits found that their liability insurance rates had also risen precipitously. A full-blown torts crisis was at hand. The common law of torts attracted a major share of the blame for each of the three crises. Observers blamed the medical malpractice crisis on judicial decisions that expanded the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur by permitting juries to infer negligence from the mere occurrence of an untoward result following medical treatment, and that recognized a duty of due care by physicians to disclose the risk of treatment to patients. Members of Congress, among others, blamed the product liability crisis on state-by-state variations in rules governing the obligations of manufacturers and sellers. Working groups formed to study the issue found the across-the-board torts crisis attributable to the erosion of fault as the basis for liability and the adoption of rules and practices that were allegedly responsible for undue increases in compensatory as well as punitive damage awards. As a consequence, those adversely affected by rising insurance costs demanded, and often achieved, what they called tort reform. Responding to pressure, states enacted pro-defendant legislative adjustments to common law rules of medical malpractice, products liability, and general tort law. By equating tort reform with unidirectional statutory modification of the common law, its advocates succeeded in investing the term with a politically useful, if skewed, meaning. Until the dawn of the present age of tort-related crises, the notion of tort reform was likely to evoke images of a movement to change pro-defendant common law rules so that injured plaintiffs could more easily win judgments or recover full damages. Indeed, through the first half of the twentieth century, the tort system tended to protect the interests of defendants in general as well as particular categories of defendants. What might be called the old tort reform was partly an effort to rectify these imbalances