Posts tagged "Florida"

If you speak with any physician that has practiced in Florida for more than 10 years, you are sure to get at least one or two horror stories about fly-by-night Florida liability insurance companies that came into the state, enticed doctors with low rates, and then disappeared as quickly as they arrived. Up until about […]

A recently released study of all medical malpractice payments made in 2011 indicates that six states accounted for more than half of all medical malpractice indemnifications. The analyzed data came from the National Practitioner Data Bank That is an astonishing statistic. Which six states accounted for more than half of all medical malpractice indemnity payments […]

The Supreme Court of Florida recently heard oral arguments in the case Evette McCall v. United States of America. At the heart of the case is whether Florida’s cap on non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases is constitutional or not. Florida passed a $500,000 cap on non-economic damages in 2003. The amount would increase to […]

On March 9th, the Florida legislature adjourned its 2012 session without passing three anticipated healthcare liability bills. The liability bills would have dealt with assisted-living facilities, medical malpractice lawsuits and the dispensing of drugs to workers-comp patients. Of greatest concern to the Florida Medical Association and its physician members was the bill dealing with medical […]

A couple of weeks ago an interesting piece of legislation (SB 1506) was put forth in the Florida state senate. Sen. John Thrasher (R-St. Augustine) filed the measure to protect physicians by sovereign immunity from large Florida physician malpractice judgements. It notes the unique feature of emergency room physicians: they are required by law to […]

The medical liability climate in Florida is a mess. Medical malpractice insurance in Miami’s Dade County is more expensive than any other in the nation, and the high cost of medical malpractice premiums influence too many doctors in the Sunshine State to choose to practice bare, without any liability insurance coverage at all. Add the […]

Last week, a Florida state senator and representative proposed legislation intended to replace the current, broken medical malpractice system in the state with an administrative structure modeled after the workers compensation system. Sen. Alan Hays and Rep. Jimmy Patronis say that the current medical liability process is adversarial, expensive and inefficient, and the legislation they […]

side note: This is a very interesting proposal by the James Madison Institute because they are addressing the cost of defensive medicine in an intellectually honest way. The report acknowledges that caps on non-economic damages are effective at lowering medical malpractice insurance rates, but not at lowering the instances of defensive medicine, which add to […]

side note: This week, the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA) released its annual Judicial Hellholes Report. Since 2002, the Judicial Hellholes Report has documented in annually published reports various abuses within the civil justice system, focusing primarily on jurisdictions where courts are radically out of balance. This list has been an invaluable tool in educating […]