Frequency and severity in medmal claims

New England Journal of Medicine got all actuarial this week with an article about frequency and severity of medical malpractice claims. (This link takes you to the online article. This one downloads the pdf.) The researchers obtained an insurance company data of 41,000 physicians and 234,000 physician-years of coverage from 1991 to 2005 and the [...]

Malpractice reform: a bright idea

Via The Corner, Former Obama budget director Peter Orszag proposes exempting doctors from malpractice liability if they follow prescribed standards of treatment. I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around the idea that doctors don’t have best practices. I, a meager casualty actuary, have a professional standard to on-level premium, trend and develop losses [...]

Medmal results could get real nasty real fast

Writing in National Underwriter, Milliman actuaries Richard Lord and Stephen Koca look at the how much current medmal results are propped up by releases of prior year reserves. As the accompanying bar graph indicates, reserve releases in each of 2008 and 2009 accounted for an almost 25 percentage point reduction in the MPL industry aggregate [...]

Medmal for hospitals set to pass $3,000 per bed

That’s the estimate coming out of Aon’s annual medical malpractice study. I blogged about the study here, but National Underwriter picked up this tidbit: Though claims against hospitals declined for a good part of the last decade, a new analysis from Aon Risk Solutions concludes that the frequency of claims against hospitals is on the [...]

Claim of the week: malpractice edition

Fox News: A Florida judge is filing his own medical malpractice lawsuit after a foot-long sponge was left inside him following surgery at a West Palm Beach Hospital. Nelson Bailey underwent surgery last year at Good Samaritan Medical Center to treat his diverticulitis, according to the Miami Herald, but his pain only got worse following [...]

Annual tab for medical errors: $19.5 billion; is that a lot?

Society of Actuaries put out a Milliman study on medical errors. It found that “measurable medical errors cost the U.S. economy $19.5 billion in 2008.” A quote: Key findings from the study include: There were 6.3 million measurable medical injuries in the U.S. in 2008; of the 6.3 million injuries, the SOA and Milliman estimate [...]