Donna, just 4 years ago, you said the cost was $14,000. Are insurers now paying attorneys twice as much?

I know facts aren’t your strong suit, but damn!

That is a number we can work with also from the text.

“Court judgments seldom happen. According to the Board of Medicine plaintiffs received 110 judgments from 1993 to 2005 – about one every six weeks.”

That means that if there is a judgment against a doctor every 6 weeks that would be a total of 8.6 judgments per year against doctors. With an 80% rate of findings for the plaintiffs, that would lead to a total number of cases where the finding was for the doctor per year of 32 or thereabouts per year.

32(90,000)= 2,880,000.

Wow. You really proved your case there.

Those years the insurance companies made 104 million per year on premiums. They paid out about 43 million on cases they lost and a SHOCKING total of 3 million defending cases they won. I now see the tight margin they live on.

Am I the only one here who can read and do math?

Ahhh…. could you please explain that to the Jury?

An accounting of “payouts” covers the cost of monies actually paid to plaintiffs and their lawyers (generally 30 to 40%).

On average, only 30% of medical malpractice suits end with ANY payment to the plaintiff OR the plaintiff’s lawyer. 70% end with no payment to the plaintiff.

However, the DEFENDANT’s lawyer must be paid whether the case yields a “payout” or not.

On average, a non-court case costs about $25,000 PER DOCTOR (as most cases name multiple physicians as defendants.) A case which goes to court (81% of which are decided by a jury IN FAVOR OF the plaintiff physician, which also means that no “payout” is involved) costs about $90,000 PER DOCTOR to defend.

Payouts are only a PORTION of medical liability insurance expenses – and while Dr. Evan may not represent ATLA, he’s using one of their most beloved misinformation tactics – deleting defense costs from the analysis of whether or not malpractice insurers are “profitable” or not….

No kidding they are. We all know that. Do you ever wonder why they’re dropping in states with “reform” and without it?

Or does your deductive reasoning not stretch that far?

Now we have reached the point where basic math is misinformation?

Is there some fault in the figures I mentioned, some problem with my logic?

Lemme know. As for the “ATLA” being involved … wow. I’m a doctor. Doctors typically like to know if what they did made a problem better or if the problem got better for factors other than what they did. You may not be a doctor so you may not be aware of this, but I am.

I know it is a hard pill to swallow, but the fact is malpractice rates are dropping. All the misinformation that ATLA is trying to interject here is a smoke screen.