That is what Tennessee’s own Jim Hall called for in today’s New York Times. An excerpt from Jim’s op-ed piece: Because American medicine accepts error as an inevitable consequence of treatment, our hospitals, insurers and government do little to respond to unnecessary deaths. If we are to address the problem…
This post is a first in a series of posts that will address new laws passed by the 106th General Assembly and signed into law by Governor Bredesen. The posts will run two or three days per week over the next several weeks. The first post is a change to…
I have released three prior posts on the financial condition of State Volunteer Mutual Insurance Company – click here to read them: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. The bottom line is that conservative financial management at SVMIC has permitted the company to accumulate a quarter of a billion dollars…
Last Friday a Memphis jury awarded almost $24M to a woman and her husband in a civil suit arising out of what the jury found to be medical negligence arising from the failure to promptly diagnose breast cancer. The woman is in the last weeks of her shortened life. It…
This is the third post about State Volunteer Mutual Insurance Company’s 2008 financial results. Click on the links to see Part 1 and Part 2. New malpractice claims asserted against SVMIC insureds dropped 2.5% in 2008. The company reports that 83% of all cases were resolved in favor of it’s policyholders…
Our last post discussed State Volunteer Mutual Insurance Company’s $251,321,000 policyholder surplus. This post will discuss other aspects of the company’s finances. As of December 31, 2008, SVMIC had total assets of $1,324,500,000 assets. (That’s $1.3 Billion). The vast majority of those assets are in government (federal, state and local) and corporate bonds,…
SVMIC continues to enjoy wonderful profitability, even as the number of physicians it insures declines. SVMIC – State Volunteer Mutual Insurance Company – is a physician-owned insurance company that was created over 30 years ago. It has grown from a company with paid-in capital of $7,500,000 to a entity with…
Torts Prof lets us know that the elected representatives in Arizona believe that ER doctors should not be held responsible for their negligence unless the patient can prove his case by clear and convincing evidence.
Georgia has a pattern jury instruction called the "hindsight" instruction. It provides as follows: In a medical malpractice action, a defendant cannot be found negligent on the basis of an assessment of a patient’s condition that only later, in hindsight, proves to be incorrect as long as the initial assessment…
My article on the new medical malpractice notice and certificate of good faith legislation (which goes into effect today, July 1) made the cover of the July edition of the Tennessee Bar Journal. Here is the article. Anyone who practices in the field of medical negligence needs to become familiar…