Medical Malpractice in Your State

limiting patients' rights does not improve care or lower insurance rates

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Indiana

According to the American Medical Association, states are losing doctors because juries are "out of control."

Reality Check:

• The number of doctors has gone up, and
• the number of OB/GYNs per 100,000 women remains steady.

Indiana already caps punitive damages and overall malpractice verdicts.

The Truth About Indiana: Despite enacting caps as early as 1998, insurers in Indiana raised premiums by an average 34.2% between 2003 and 2004. See the chart.

Indiana Citizen Speaks Out: One of the lobbyists responsible for Indiana's malpractice laws was Frank Cornelius, a former insurance industry lobbyist who was left severely and permanently injured by medical malpractice. Ultimately, he died as a result of those injuries. Frank's story.

Nationally, medical errors are a real concern with USA Today reporting that medical errors seriously injure 1 in 10 hospitalized patients.

In fact, the Institute of Medicine reported as early as 1999 that medical errors are a national crisis. Yet, those same researchers recently noted that despite 5 years of calls to action, the medical community has made little progress in reducing the risk to patients who use the healthcare system. In particular, researcher Lucian Leape thinks that the medical community "has deflected attention from saving patients to saving money." read more...

Patient Safety Should Come First

Instead of limiting patients' rights, Congress should look to preventing insurance companies from price-gouging doctors and help implement processes that will put patient safety first. Fixing the system to put patient safety first will ultimately bring down costs for everyone. In Indiana alone, preventable medical errors in hospitals cost $367-$627 million a year, according to the consumer safety and health organization Public Citizen.

Faces of Medical Malpractice

In 1975, Frank Cornelius of Carmel, Indiana helped persuade the Indiana Legislature to pass what was acclaimed as a pioneering reform of the medical malpractice laws: a $500,000 cap on damage awards, and elimination of all damages for pain and suffering. A former lobbyist whose clients included the Insurance Institute of Indiana, Frank argued successfully that such limits would reduce health care costs and encourage physicians to stay in Indiana—the same sort of arguments that now underpin the medical industry's call for national malpractice reform.

"Today, from my wheelchair, I rue that accomplishment," wrote Frank in 1994, about one year before his death as a result of severe injuries caused by medical malpractice. In a moving editorial printed in the New York Times, Frank outlined the pain he felt when seeing the practical impact of a severe cap and realizing that it was all for nothing because the law didn't even achieve its stated purpose.

Read Frank's story in "Crushed By My Own Reform"

Number of Personal Injury Lawsuits

There is no litigation explosion. The National Center for State Courts Recently reported that:

• Tort filings have declined by 5% since 1993. Contract filings, meanwhile, which are more likely to involve businesses than tort cases, rose by 21% over the same period.¹

• Automobile tort filings, which make up the majority of all tort claims, have fallen by 5% by 1993 and 14% since their high in 1996.¹

• Medical malpractice filings per 100,000 population have fallen 1% since 1998.²

• In 22 of the 30 states that NCSC examined population-adjusted tort findings declined from 1992 to 2001. The average change in tort filings across all 30 states was a 15% decrease.¹

Sources:

1. Examining the Work of State Courts, 2003, National Center for State Courts (NCSC) 2004
2. Medical Malpractice Filings per 100,000 Population in 11 and 17 States, 1993-2002, National Center for State Courts, 2004 (unpublished, on file with author)

Updated September 2005