New York Personal Injury Blog | Lever & Stolzenberg, LLP Legal Blog

Do We Need Tort Reform In Medical Malpractice Context?

In recent years, New York’s medical community has decried hikes in
medical malpractice insurance premiums. Describing the premium
increases as “devastating,” the medical lobby has claimed that the costs of
liability coverage are driving doctors out of New York State. At least one
doctor group has also charged that “a wildly unpredictable medical liability
adjudication system” is the driving force in increasing premiums. The
result, they say, is that New Yorkers have increasing difficulty in accessing
care from the so-called “high risk” specialists, such as obstetricians and
neurosurgeons.
But are these claims true? According to the federal governmental data
reviewed for a mind shattering recent report, the answer is a resounding “NO.”
This report’s overall finding is that, based on the actual litigation payments
made by the state’s doctors over a number of years, New York’s
malpractice system appears to be remarkably consistent, stable and fair.
In fact, NPDB data shows that payouts have been reducing since 2006.
Federal law requires that all medical malpractice payment information be
reported to the government’s National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB).
The NPDB’s Public Use Data File is the only publicly-available,
comprehensive malpractice database in the nation.
While the NPDB is prohibited by law from releasing the names of
individual doctors who have paid malpractice payments, it does release
aggregated information about those payments.