David Leonhardt writes for the New York Times‘ Economix blog regularly. Recently, he authored a piece on the incidence of physician malpractice in the U.S. It contained a nifty chart, which I am sharing with you here. The things to take away from this are: Malpractice claims vary widely by physician specialty and malpractice claims rarely result in a payment of any kind (either a settlement or a judgment). That doesn’t mean we don’t need malpractice reform. We do. But it does put a limit on how much cost-savings such reform will generate.
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Anonymous
September 20, 2011 at 7:57 pm
The physician settlement dollar amount may be relatively small but the effect of malpractice reform on the daily practice of medicine (perhaps less expensive/less defensive care) might be much larger, resulting in a significant decrease in US health care expenditure overall. (There may be studies looking at this now.)