Insurance Law Commons^™

Turning From Damage Caps To Information Disclosure: An Alternative To Tort Reform, Kathryn Zeiler

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Medical malpractice damage caps are among the most popular instruments of tort reform at the state level. The Bush administration proposed a federal damage cap on non-economic damages to quell the rise of medical malpractice insurance premiums despite the paucity of empirical evidence demonstrating that damage caps actually decrease premiums. This case study argues that imposing statutory caps on medical malpractice damages is not an effective method of remedying the medical malpractice insurance crisis: therefore, policymakers should consider alternatives to damage caps. In particular, evidence suggests that implementing mandatory disclosure of the contract terms between managed care organizations and physicians …

Rights And Efficiency In American Health Law, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

During the 1960s and 1970s, the individual rights revolution that swept through American society remade much of the nation's health law in its image. Sick people acquired the right to be told of the risks and benefits of proposed treatments and then to give thumbs-up or thumbs-down to their doctors' decisions. Successful suits for medical negligence went from rare to commonplace. Elderly and poor Americans achieved statutory rights of access to publicly funded healthcare, and courts burnished these rights with myriad procedural protections. The critically ill and their families won the right to refuse aggressive, life-sustaining treatments. Psychiatric patients acquired …

Health Care Reform In The United States, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author presents a brief description of the design features and objectives of the health care reform package, together with the reasons to support reform of the health care system in the United States.

Foreword: Health Care Reform In The United States—The Presidential Task Force, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay serves as the foreword to Implementing U.S. Health Care Reform, a symposium held in 1993.

The exact specifications of the new health care system depend on the package that President Clinton will send to Capitol Hill and the changes that Congress will make in the reform package. Some of the basic structures and organizing principles of the new system that are being considered by the President are already the subject of intense public scrutiny.

The design being considered would involve new relations between the federal government and the states, between the public and private sectors, and between …

Book Review: Deforming Tort Reform, Joseph A. Page

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The storms buffeting the tort system over the past two decades have come in three distinct waves. In the late 1960s, steep increases in the insurance costs incurred by health care providers protecting against negligence claims by patients triggered what came to be known as the "medical malpractice crisis." In the mid-1970s, manufacturers whose liability insurance premiums suddenly soared raised obstreperous complaints that called public attention to the existence of a "product liability crisis." Finally, other groups whose activities created risks exposing them to lawsuits found that their liability insurance rates had also risen precipitously. A full-blown "torts crisis" was …

Book Review Of Daniel G. Baldyga's: How To Settle Your Own Insurance Claim, Joseph A. Page

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

How to Settle tries to exploit the same vein mined in spectacular fashion by Norman F. Dacey, who parlayed deep dissatisfaction with the probate system and popular resentment of lawyers into a runaway best-seller. It would seem, up to this point anyway, that people more readily worry about the inevitability of death and its legal consequences than the possibility of personal injury caused by the legal fault of another. Nonetheless, How to Settle does merit some attention, at least within the confines of a specialized journal and under circumstances unlikely to promote a sales backlash, so that all its shortcomings …