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New York's Medical Malpractice Insurance Crises--A New Direction For Reform, Mark Monaco

Fordham Urban Law Journal

Beginning in the early 1970's, insurance companies nationwide began dropping out of the medical malpractice market. Medical malpractice had become an unprofitable field for investment partly because of a sharp and continuing increase both in the number of malpractice suits being brought against health-care providers and in the size of damage awards and settlements in medical malpractice cases. In response to increasing pressure from the medical profession and the insurance industry, many states in the mid-1970's began to experiment with ways of limiting the number of claims being entered against physicians and hospitals, and reducing the size of malpractice awards …