Day on Torts
More of our coverage of the 2013 Tennessee Health Care Liability Report issue by the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance reflecting medical malpractice claims information for the year ending December 31, 2012.
As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, the total damages paid to claimants in 2012 was $90,520,000, for an average of $208,000 per claimant. Here are the numbers for the previous four years.
| 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 |
| 119,300,00 | 111,000,000 | 109,000,000 | 114,000,000 | 90,520,00 |
Thus, we see an almost 25% decline in the total dollars paid to claimants in the last five years.
This chart gives us an understanding of the severity of injuries in the claims paid in 2012:
| Injury | Number Paid | Amount Paid |
| Death | 124 | $51,403,476 |
| Major Temporary | 72 | $11,855,186 |
| Minor Temporary | 72 | $5,436,395 |
| Significant Permanent | 23 | $7,732,010 |
| Insignificant | 21 | $338,185 |
| Emotional Only | 3 | $103,804 |
| Major Permanent | 11 | $4,116,000 |
| Grave Permanent | 13 | $7,003,500 |
| Minor Permanent | 16 | $1,222,309 |
Now let’s add a few more columns of data to get a clear understanding of what is going on in the medical malpractice claims world in Tennessee:
| Injury | Total Number of Claims | Paid Claims | % Paid of Total Claims | Unpaid Claims | % Unpaid of Total Claims | Total Claim Payments | Average Amount Per Paid Claim |
| Death | 549 | 124 | 23% | 335 | 77% | $51,403,476 | $414,544 |
| Major Temporary | 277 | 72 | 26% | 205 | 74% | $11,855,186 | $164,655 |
| Minor Temporary | 263 | 72 | 27% | 191 | 73% | $5,436,395 | $75,505 |
| Significant Permanent | 128 | 23 | 18% | 105 | 82% | $7,732,010 | $336,174 |
| Insignificant | 90 | 21 | 23% | 69 | 77% | $338,185 | $16,104 |
| Emotional Only | 88 | 3 | 3% | 85 | 97% | $103,804 | $34,601 |
| Major Permanent | 67 | 11 | 16% | 56 | 84% | $4,116,000 | $374,182 |
| Grave Permanent | 63 | 13 | 21% | 50 | 79% | $7,003.500 | $538,731 |
| Minor Permanent | 52 | 16 | 31% | 36 | 69% | $1,222,309 | $76,394 |
Let this data be a warning to inexperienced medical malpractice lawyers: severe injury and death do not result in settlements or judgments. More than 70% of the time allegations involving that type of injury result in no payment whatsoever to the claimant.
The average settlement of per claim data on some of these categories is quite a surprise. To be sure, some number of cases involve two or more claims, and thus the settlement or judgment would tend to be higher. But, still, the numbers here are lower than I would expect.
There will be more data in the our next post, Tennessee Medical Malpractice (Health Care Liability) Statistics – Part 3.