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How Liability Insurers Protect Patients And Improve Safety, Tom Baker, Charles Silver
How Liability Insurers Protect Patients And Improve Safety, Tom Baker, Charles Silver
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Forty years after the publication of the first systematic study of adverse medical events, there is greater access to information about adverse medical events and increasingly widespread acceptance of the view that patient safety requires more than vigilance by well-intentioned medical professionals. In this essay, we describe some of the ways that medical liability insurance organizations contributed to this transformation, and we catalog the roles that those organizations play in promoting patient safety today. Whether liability insurance in fact discourages providers from improving safety or encourages them to protect patients from avoidable harms is an empirical question that a survey …
Medicare Secondary Payer And Settlement Delay, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick
Medicare Secondary Payer And Settlement Delay, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick
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The Medicare Secondary Payer Act of 1980 and its subsequent amendments require that insurers and self-insured companies report settlements, awards, and judgments that involve a Medicare beneficiary to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The parties then may be required to compensate CMS for its conditional payments. In a simple settlement model, this makes settlement less likely. Also, the reporting delays and uncertainty regarding the size of these conditional payments are likely to further frustrate the settlement process. We provide results, using data from a large insurer, showing that, on average, implementation of the MSP reporting amendments led to …
Allowing Patients To Waive The Right To Sue For Medical Malpractice: A Response To Thaler And Sunstein, Tom Baker, Timothy D. Lytton
Allowing Patients To Waive The Right To Sue For Medical Malpractice: A Response To Thaler And Sunstein, Tom Baker, Timothy D. Lytton
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This essay critically evaluates Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s proposal to allow patients to prospectively waive their rights to bring a malpractice claim, presented in their recent, much acclaimed book, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness. We show that the behavioral insights that undergird Nudge do not support the waiver proposal. In addition, we demonstrate that Thaler and Sunstein have not provided a persuasive cost-benefit justification for the proposal. Finally, we argue that their liberty-based defense of waivers rests on misleading analogies and polemical rhetoric that ignore the liberty and other interests served by patients’ tort law rights. …
Medical Malpractice And The Insurance Underwriting Cycle, Tom Baker
Medical Malpractice And The Insurance Underwriting Cycle, Tom Baker
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No abstract provided.