Physician malpractice is when a doctor fails to meet accepted standards of care, causing harm to a patient. Professional indemnity insurance is required to cover costs of malpractice claims. Advocacy groups lobby for medical malpractice reform, including a cap on punitive damages to reduce insurance costs.
Neglect occurs when one person breaches a duty to another and suffers harm to that second person. Physician malpractice, usually referred to as “medical malpractice,” is a particular form of professional malpractice whereby a physician, in providing care, acts below the accepted standards of his profession in his geographic area. The costly nature of such physician malpractice claims generally requires medical professionals to have professional indemnity insurance. These costs have also led physician advocacy groups to lobby for medical malpractice reform.
A typical negligence claim will involve four elements: a duty to the victim owed by the allegedly negligent party, a breach of that duty by the allegedly negligent party, actual harm to the victim, and such harm must have been caused by the negligent party’s breach of the foregoing duty. In the context of a physician malpractice claim, the malpractice must involve the physician administering care that falls outside the accepted standards of his or her profession. The accepted level of care that similar medical professionals provide in the geographic area where the physician practices usually determines those standards. However, many jurisdictions have statutes that set the standards, and violation of these statutes per se constitutes malpractice—that is, by violating the rules of the statute, the physician’s actions automatically amount to malpractice.
Medical professionals are generally required to have professional indemnity insurance to protect themselves against doctor malpractice claims. Typically, a doctor’s professional liability insurance covers all costs of a malpractice claim against the doctor. These costs may include attorney fees and any award awarded to a plaintiff.
The significant expense of medical professional liability insurance has led physician advocacy groups to lobby for medical malpractice reform. The goal of the medical malpractice reform movement is to influence the enactment of various legislative measures to contain the potential costs of medical malpractice litigation. The central argument is that the laws are too skewed in favor of the victims of physician malpractice.
An example of a popular medical malpractice reform measure advocated by physician advocacy groups is a cap on punitive damages. Punitive damages—damages imposed on the negligent parties beyond the victim’s actual financial loss for the purposes of punishment—are typically high in physician malpractice cases, although the amount depends on the egregious of the negligence. Proponents of medical malpractice reform argue that a limitation on those damages would go a long way towards reducing the costs of medical professional indemnity insurance, since the potential compensation in a doctor’s malpractice claim would be limited.
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