Medical Malpractice in Your State

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

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Texas

According to the American Medical Association, Texas is no longer a "crisis" state because of new legal restrictions.

Reality Check:

What the AMA has called "reforms" were actually some of the most severe restrictions on patients' rights in the country, leaving abused patients in nursing homes, children, and women without protection or legal recourse to hold negligent facilities and repeatedly negligent doctors accountable.

Data show that the earlier designation of Texas as in "crisis" was purely political. Before the changes in law:

• The number of doctors was going up,
• the number of OB/GYNs was increasing, and
• the median compensation insurers paid victims was stable.

The Truth About Texas: Texas was one of five states that recently passed new medical malpractice damage caps. Instead of decreasing, premiums in these states nearly doubled the increase rate as states not passing new caps. View the chart.

Insurance Reform: Texas' doctors have seen that legal restrictions primarily help insurance companies - not patients or caregivers. The Houston Chronicle reports that recent reductions in insurance premiums are nothing compared to the profits brought in by unjustifiable rate increases in recent years. Read more.

Texas caps punitive and noneconomic damages, and has an overall cap in medical malpractice wrongful death cases.

Price of Medical Malpractice

Source: Medical Malpractice Briefing Book: Challenging the Misleading Claims of the Doctors' Lobby, Public Citizen Congress Watch, rev. August 2004

Insurance Industry

Sudden Reductions Are A Ruse: After high-profile reports showing Texas insurers to enact huge rate increases despite severe restrictions on malpractice compensation, two insurers announced modest rate reductions in March 2005. However, the Houston Chronicle reports that the reductions come after huge rate increases.

Specifically, The Doctors Company will decrease rates by an average of 14%. But it had raised its premiums 101.5% since 1999. Likewise, American Physicians announced an average decrease of 5%, but had increased their rates by 85% since 1999.

Read Critics Note Reductions Come After Big Increases for more information.

No Evidence of a Malpractice Crisis: A new study finds that despite huge rate increases from insurance companies there is no evidence of a medical malpractice crisis in Texas.

In "Stability, Not Crisis: Medical Malpractice Claim Outcomes in Texas, 1988-2002," researchers from the University of Texas and Columbia University report that the three biggest insurers in Texas have increased rates by an average of 135% over the last five years.

Yet, data from the Texas Department of Insurance shows that the number of claims, the value of claims, and the rate of claims per physician have all remained constant or declined over the last decade.

Read No Evidence of a Malpractice Crisis for more information.

Texas Watch on the Broken Promises of Proposition 12: Lawmakers promised lower malpractice insurance premiums for Texas doctors.

"All the evidence indicates that once you have these caps, you will have a rollback in malpractice rates.” - State Representative Joe Nixon, Author of House Bill 4 and Prop 12

But in reality, doctors have not seen relief from excessive malpractice rates.

• Insurance companies have tried to increase premiums by as much 35% since Prop 12 passed.
• Doctors have seen less than a 1.5% reduction in their premiums since 2003.
• Only one company, TMLT, has lowered rates, but its customers are still paying 130% more than they were 5 years ago.

Read Broken Promises: Proposition 12's Real Impact on Texas Families for more information.

Faces of Medical Malpractice

Kim Tutt was concerned about a small lump inside her gum that would not heal. Her dentist suggested that she have a head and neck surgeon remove and biopsy the lump. The initial pathologist diagnosed the biopsied tissue as neuro-endicrine small cell carcinoma. This type of cancer usually does not originate in the mouth, and is extremely rare in a woman of Kim's age. Instead of personally double-checking against the possibility of cross contamination, the pathologist testified that he simply "called his receptionist" and asked her to check if any other neuro-endicrine carcinoma had been identified inside the time frame during which Kim's slides had been received and processed by his lab. Relying in part on the original pathology, surgeons at UT Southwestern medical school performed radical surgery, removing Kim's right lower jaw and all of her teeth on that side. Some were replaced with bone taken from her leg.

After surgery, further pathology on the removed tissue failed to produce any sign of cancer. Immediately suspecting cross contamination, the surgeons called the original pathologist and asked him to personally recheck his records. Upon doing so, it was discovered that, in fact, there had been another case in his lab during the critical time frame. DNA testing subsequently determined that the carcinoma attributed to Kim was in fact from the other patient. There is no indication that Kim ever had cancer.

Source: American Association for Justice

Read about other victims of medical malpractice in Texas

Read President Bush's Flip-Flop on Patients' Rights

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 May 2005