by PPN | Dec 23, 2014 | California, News
On November 4, 2014, Californians voted against Proposition 46, an unprecedented statewide ballot initiative that would have, among other things, raised the $250,000 cap on noneconomic damages to $1.1 million and indexed it to the rate of inflation in future years....
by PPN | Nov 25, 2014 | News
Crisis, it is said, means both danger and opportunity. In medical liability reform, however, greater opportunity may lie in noncrisis. In this issue of JAMA, Mello and colleagues offer data suggesting that no crisis of the conventional sort currently exists in the...
by PPN | Oct 30, 2014 | California, Florida, Idaho, Minnesota, Mississippi, New York, News, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin
For the seventh straight year, malpractice insurance premiums have decreased for three bellwether specialties, and even for sticker-shocked obstetrician-gynecologists on Long Island in New York, according to an annual premium survey released this week by Medical...
by PPN | Sep 30, 2014 | News
Physicians order unnecessary tests and procedures to inoculate themselves from legal liability more than they realize, according to a new survey of physicians at several hospitals in one Massachusetts health system. Nearly a third of the orders that the surveyed...
by PPN | Sep 30, 2014 | California, News
The lawyers who put together and funded Proposition 46 might have been too clever for their own good. The main motivation for the measure is inescapably clear: to raise the ceiling on “noneconomic damages” in medical malpractice lawsuits — in plain language, “pain and...
by PPN | Sep 30, 2014 | California, News
Physicians should not get drunk or stoned, especially before operating on patients. They ought to make sure their patients need prescriptions for ailments, not to feed addictions. And policymakers should consider updating the 1975 law that capped damages in medical...