Hospitals and insurance companies will have to report back in September.
Six Virginia lawmakers tasked with reworking legislation that eyed sweeping changes for medical malpractice lawsuits — including a sharp increase of the state’s cap on court damages — came out of the negotiation room days later with an entirely new bill.
As previously reported, the initial legislation from state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R–Rockingham) was tweaked along the legislative process. The bill then underwent a last-minute rewrite in the House of Delegates, including a significant revision to raise Virginia’s cap on payouts for medical malpractice claims from under $3 million to $6 million by 2027.
Health care providers voiced concerns about potentially not being able to get medical malpractice liability coverage under that cap, driving the six legislators charged with coming up with a compromise to go in a different direction with the final iteration of the bill.
“The cap will stay the same,” Del. Patrick Hope (D–Arlington), one of the six negotiators, said on the House floor before the chamber’s final 78–18 vote on Saturday. “What this does do, though, it’s more of a data gathering exercise.”
Legislators opted to require hospitals and insurers to disclose more information on malpractice cases instead of overhauling the legal landscape for medical malpractice cases, but they signaled that changes were inevitable.
“I do think that the way the current caps are situated, it’s too low,” Hope told VPM News. “And I think there’s a recognition that it’s too low.”
Under current state law, payments of court damages in malpractice lawsuits are capped, though the limit has increased over time: It incrementally went up from $1.5 million in 1999 to $2.95 million in the fiscal year that ends June 30, 2031. After that point, state law says the cap should not go over $3 million.
Obenshain said the cap was adopted to keep doctors from being driven out of Virginia and he wants to keep it, but he laid out his concerns before the Senate’s 37–2 vote on the final legislation. He said the damages cap hasn’t kept pace with inflation or the cost of living, and that it should be roughly $8 million today.
“The medical malpractice cap is under a lot of pressure, and I think unless we do something to address that pressure, we’re at risk of losing the cap altogether,” Obenshain, an attorney whose law firm works on medical malpractice cases, said on the Senate floor. “I don’t think that’s a good thing.”
Julian Walker, vice president of communications with the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association, the current framework for malpractice cases and potential adjustments has been a yearslong discussion.
“Those conversations have not produced a consensus around changes to the medical malpractice framework in Virginia,” he told VPM News after the bill was finalized.
Obenshain’s original bill initially set out to ensure that interest collected by plaintiffs in medical malpractice cases before a final verdict isn’t included in the total amount they can be awarded.
But the proposed policy tweak that Obsenshain called “minor” went from a one-page bill to eight pages long when it underwent significant revisions in the House Courts of Justice Committee.
While explaining the final bill on the Senate floor, Obenshain said “The House took that bill and ran with it,” even though he went along with the rewrite.
On top of proposing more than doubling the state’s damages cap in malpractice cases from just under $3 million to $6 million, the House committee’s substitute bill extended Virginia’s statute of limitations to a much broader range of medical malpractice lawsuits.
When the House’s substitute was up for public comment, representatives for health care providers said they were worried about liability coverage potentially being too expensive and out of their reach. Even for hospitals and other providers that could get coverage under the House’s old proposal, Walker said their patients could see higher costs.
“In that hypothetical scenario, if the cost of liability coverage goes up, the related operational costs go up, and anytime that happens, ultimately that has an accelerating effect on the system as a whole,” he told VPM News. “If the cost of operating goes up, that’s going to end up being reflected in what businesses, families, employers end up paying for health care coverage.”
Walker said the House’s rewrite, which was released on March 4, came too late in session to allow stakeholders to vet the proposal and that he believes lawmakers in the conference committee heard those concerns and changed the legislation.
Del. Marcus Simon (D–Fairfax), another lawmaker who was part of the negotiations, told VPM News that concerns from providers and clinics about potentially not being able to get liability insurance coverage was a main driver for the rewrite.
The final version of the bill, which the statehouse passed on the last day of the 2026 General Assembly session, requires health care providers and insurers covering them with malpractice liability policies to disclose details about premiums, doctors covered under programs, claim payments, settlements, litigation costs and more.
Under the legislation now headed to Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger, hospitals and insurance companies will have to report back to state lawmakers in September.
“I really am optimistic,” Hope said about the measure. “I think this is an opportunity for us to learn and I think we’ll have even more information before us to make the right decision that has a balance between what’s fair for the patient and what’s fair for continued patient access and for our providers too.”
Walker called the final bill “an intermediate step,” saying that conversations about the damages cap would continue. Obenshain said he hopes the bill means that other stakeholders, not lawmakers, will resolve the issues with the cap for medical malpractice cases.
“If not, then we’re going to have information in our hands so that we can make an assessment all together,” he said.