Transcript of The National Press Club Debate
MMM Medical Malpractice
October 1, 2004
Bob Carden (BC): My name’s Bob Carden. I’m with the Newsmakers Clinic here at the Press Club. Just a few general rules. This is open to the press and members, but we don’t check I.D. What I’m going to do is introduce our two guests, and they’re going to give a five or 10-minute presentation on their point of view, and then we’ll take questions from the audience. We are very interested in your questions. We are not interested in your opinions. We have their opinions here. That’s what we’re interested in.
With us we have Richard Anderson, M.D., F.A.C.P., who is chairman and CEO of The Doctors Company, a medical malpractice insurer, who is a strong advocate of medical tort reform. Joanne Doroshow of the Center for Justice and Democracy. And she’s going to take the opposite point of view. And I would just like to begin by saying to Joanne; I want to throw it to you first. And I guess the general public, you’ve all read these stories—you’ve all read these horror stories—a woman has a cup of coffee and she gets a half a million dollars. Doesn’t this sort of; is this resonating? Doesn’t it say that things might be a little bit out of control? I hate being anecdotal like that, but that’s what we see. We see these juries awarding these things that are—just seem a little bit crazy. Now I want to hear your point of view about this.
Joannne Doroshow (JD): Well, let me start out by saying that I’m one of very few people who could say that we used to talk about medical malpractice insurance when I was a kid sitting around the dinner table, because my father sold insurance for a living. And, in fact, he specialized in selling insurance to doctors. And, you know, he used to bring all kinds of stories home with him, and we’d talk about it.
And in the eighties, he actually had bone cancer and was misdiagnosed by his doctor for a period of about five years. Then he passed away. And when my brother and I were going through his sock drawer, we actually found a chronology that he had laid out of all the instances of misdiagnosis. And I’m sure what he was doing was basically instructing my brother and myself to go ahead and file a lawsuit if you think you want to do that because here’s the evidence. But, of course, my brother and I didn’t do that. We didn’t even think about doing that.
And I think that that is typical of the experience of most people that are victims of medical malpractice in this country. Most people don’t sue. And the data is pretty clear on that. If I could read a quote from Dr. Richard Roberts, chairman of the American Academy of Family Physicians, he said recently about one in fifty hospitalized patients is injured due to negligence. And yet only one in ten of those file a lawsuit, and among those filing suits only one in twenty receives money. There is more malpractice committed than is recognized, litigated, or compensated. Plaintiffs in most cases are not gold digging.
And the vast majority of plaintiffs have medical outcomes none of us would want for ourselves or for our loved ones. So when you’re talking about caps and things like tort reform, which is essentially limiting the power and the authority of juries in this country, which is a constitutionally established institution, then you better have some data to go on to back up why you think you need to do that. And here’s what else the data shows; in addition to what I just talked about, there have been volcanic eruptions in insurance premiums for doctors three times in the last thirty years. And the cause is always the same.
And insurers essentially make most of their money off of their investments. When the economy tanks or interest rates drop, the insurers will always respond the same way—by dramatically raising rates. And this is compounded by the fact that there’s usually underpricing of policies that goes on during the soft market, when they’re making a lot of money off of their investments because they’re just trying to get premium dollars to invest. So we’re now into the third hard market in the last thirty years, although unfortunately it’s starting to end.
But the response of the insurers is always the same; they blame the lawyers—it’s not our fault—even though you have to accept the notion that somehow juries were engineering large awards in the mid-seventies when the first crisis hit and then stopped for ten years. And then started awarding large awards again in the mid-eighties when the second crisis hit and then stopped for seventeen years, and then suddenly are awarding large damages again. Of course that’s ludicrous, and it’s also not true as all the data shows. In fact, what I like to look at, rather than even talk about jury verdicts, is what insurers are paying out because they’re the ones that are raising premiums on doctors, and they’re the ones that are screaming about what they’re paying out. And what you find according to our work is when you adjust this, their payouts, certainly for inflation and for the number of doctors; they’ve stayed pretty constant for the last decade certainly.
And the average payout for insurers is about $30,000 per claim. The average payout when actual money is awarded, which is a small majority of cases—about 23 percent where they pay anything at all—is about $107,000. The total payout of insurers in medical malpractice is about four billion a year, which is about half of what we spend on cat and dog food in this country.
Meanwhile in the last year, profits for insurers have skyrocketed 1,000 percent or so, according to much of the data that’s come out in the trade publications and the insurance industry’s own profit data sheets. So we know that the problem is an insurance problem. We know that juries and patients are not the problem here in terms of what rates are going up. And we also know that rates will not come down by capping damages. We know that, for example, the American Trial Lawyers Association (ATLA) said that—pretty clearly in 1999 before this third crisis hit—they’ve never said that the way to reduce premiums is to enact tort reform. And Victor Schwartz, who’s their principal lobbyist, said many tort reform advocates don’t advocate this to bring down rates. And I’ve never said that in thirty years.
And then more recently, we have Weiss ratings, which came out last year saying that states with caps on noneconomic damages have seen rates go up 48 percent. States without caps less, 36 percent. And then lo and behold the National Bureau of Economic Research came out with a very important study in August. This is a very conservative economic research firm, and here’s what they said: “The fact that we see very little evidence of widespread physician exodus or dramatic increases in the use of defensive medicine in response to increases in state malpractice premiums places the more dire predictions of malpractice alarmists in doubt. The arguments that state tort reforms will avert local physician shortages or lead to greater efficiencies in care are not supported by our findings.” And, surprisingly, they found that premiums basically have absolutely no connection to claims and payouts by insurers. They found that to be a surprising finding. This is something that we’ve known for years and is consistent with what other bodies have found as well.
States that have passed tort reforms in the last couple of years are trying to bring down rates—Ohio, for example, rates were capped, insurers came and then the top five insurers in the state immediately asked for rate hikes. The same thing happened with Oklahoma. In Texas, where they just passed a constitutional amendment allowing for caps, the Texas Medical Liability Trust had increased rates 147 percent since 1999. They’re offering to reduce rates 12 percent, they’ve announced in January; and that may be another five. It’s not working because what’s driving this crisis is not the legal system. What’s driving it are the business and accounting practices of the insurance industry.
Now consumer groups have been saying for years that’s the way to reduce rates; to stop these cycles, these sharp ups and downs in insurance reform. We see that it’s working in California. Proposition 103, passed in 1988, has allowed the local consumer group in that state to go in three times now in the last year to force rates down. That’s because the law allows for a hearing for any rate we classed above 15 percent. And every time it’s happened, a local group has gone in there, challenged the rate and they’ve been slashed. That’s how we know Proposition 103 works. That’s how we know that insurance reform is the answer to this problem. Trying to address this issue by tackling patient’s rights in the legal system will not only have devastating consequences for catastrophic injuries in children, it will have absolutely no impact on insurance rates for doctors.
Dr. Richard Anderson (RA): Well, I think we now know why they call it the Center for Justice and Democracy...but not truth. There are multiple fires burning in our health care system today, but the malpractice insurance crisis is among the most serious, and ironically the one that can be the most easily remedied. This morning I would like to outline its extent, address the real causes, and equally important, identify the spurious issues that have been injected into this discussion. Finally, I’d like to talk about the genuine solutions that are available today.
Today, half the neurosurgeons in the United States report a malpractice claim every year. It means that on the average, every neurosurgeon in the United States faces a malpractice claim every other year. If you’re an obstetrician, an orthopedist, an emergency room physician, or a trauma surgeon, the numbers are similar. About one-third reports claims every year. The average practitioner or the average specialist in that area reports a claim every three years. We know that approximately 80 percent of these claims close without payment. But each one costs close to $25,000 on the average to resolve. We know that the median jury award has doubled since 1997, and that today the average malpractice jury award exceeds $3.5 million.
Over the past three or four years, insurers have paid out $1.40 in claims losses and expenses for every dollar of premium taken in. In response, insurers have raised rates 15 to 20 percent per year for the last three years or so. But this average figure is much lower in states with effective tort reform and much higher in states without it. Averages can be deceiving. You’ll recall that Robert Reich, secretary of labor under Clinton, who is four foot eleven, pointed out that the average height of he and Shaquille O’Neal was six feet one.
We hear endlessly—and I’m amazed that Ms. Doroshow did not mention it this morning, but I think it’s important to address it—about the Institute of Medicine medical error publication, To Err Is Human. It’s important that we address it because the 98,000 Americans allegedly dying every year of medical malpractice never existed. The figure arises from 180 poorly classified cases in the state of New York in 1984 and, through the wonders of extrapolation, became 98,000 Americans dying every year through medical negligence.
If you look at the actual malpractice claims that arose from the study, as the Harvard authors themselves did, the authors found that more than half of the malpractice claims did not even contain evidence of medical injury, and that only one in six contained any evidence, even by their liberal standards, of medical negligence. By far the most important conclusion of the Harvard Medical Practice Study, and the one that you hear least often, and again this is the authors’ conclusion, not mine, is that there’s no relationship between the presence or absence of medical negligence and the outcome of medical malpractice litigation. No relationship between the presence or absence of medical negligence and the outcome of medical malpractice litigation. The only variable that predicts for outcome in medical malpractice litigation is degree of injury. If you go into court with a severe injury, you are more likely to be indemnified than if you have a minor injury, regardless of whether or not medical negligence played a part.
I’d like to address some of the assiduously cultivated myths about insurance companies, but first please take note that two-thirds of America’s doctors are insured by insurance companies that are either mutual or reciprocals. They are owned by the policyholders themselves.
There are no shareholders. There is no independent profit motive. Insurance is a heavily regulated industry. Most states’ rates require the approval of the department of insurance. Investment portfolios are heavily scrutinized by these departments of insurance, by A.M. Best, by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, and by organizations such as Standard and Poors.
Insurers are accused of trying to recoup stock market losses, but the easily verifiable facts are that fewer than 10 percent of insurance company assets were held in the stock market. And more importantly, to the best of my knowledge, there is not a single medical malpractice insurer that has had even one year of net negative investment income—not one. What is true is that, commendably and appropriately, insurers used the high levels of investment income available in the 1990s to subsidize consumer prices. This is a good thing. Is Ms. Doroshow advocating that we should have pocketed the profits instead? In today’s investment market, subsidies are smaller. But again, subsidies of what? Subsidies of the claims losses that have been rising steadily.
The expense ratio of most medical malpractice insurance companies in the United States today is about 15 percent, and this includes all salaries, rent, computers, the cost of underwriting, and maintaining an underwriting department and a claims department. I’d be happy to compare that figure with those of any consumer group. But, of course, we don’t have such information available. Over the past twenty-five years, A.M. Best indicates that medical malpractice insurers have paid out $1.25 for each dollar of premium that they have taken in. That’s over a twenty-five year period of time. I ask you whether this is the profile of the rapacious industry?
Let’s talk about the fallacy of the bad doctor. It is often correctly stated that 2 percent of claims account for 50 percent of losses. That’s true. This fact is then immediately distorted into the implication that 2 percent of doctors cause half the losses, so if we simply eliminated those bad doctors, the malpractice crisis would go away. In fact, of course, that’s nottrue because the doctors involved are not the same doctors every year. Quite obviously, if the same doctors were causing the losses every year—and, first of all, none of us would practice with them because they would be an embarrassment to the profession—certainly none of us would insure them. The problem is explained very simply by the Harvard Medical Practice Study itself. The fact is that the malpractice signal is a random signal. No relationship between the presence or absence of medical negligence and the outcome of medical malpractice litigation exists. In fact, the causality is the reverse. And that’s a handy rule of thumb whenever looking to understand arguments that come from ATLA and its related groups.
The system that Ms. Doroshow is so vigorous in defending in the name of consumers allows 2 percent of plaintiffs and their contingency fee attorneys to take 50 percent of all the indemnity, leaving the other 98 percent of plaintiffs to divide what’s left. Why should you care? Because we all need access to health care.
There is no constituency that is demanding less health care. If it’s your son with a head injury after a football game or a car accident and there’s no neurosurgeon, no trauma center or emergency room, then you have an access to care crisis. And if you live in Washington, D.C., I hope you realize how little malpractice suits reflect on the quality of the physicians, because there isn’t a single neurosurgeon in the city of Washington, D.C., who has not already been sued for medical malpractice. If you or your wife or your daughter is pregnant and cannot find an obstetrician near your home, then you have an access to care problem. If you or your wife or your daughter or your mother needs a mammogram and there’s a six-week wait, then you have an access to care problem. The state of the art today is that 15 percent of cancers will not be visible on mammograms. Most of these end up in litigation. How would members of the press feel if they were sued for 15 percent of their stories?
So what do we do? If you were designing a plan for tort reform today, you would still use the basic tenets of MICRA, Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act in California, passed in 1975. This is not an experiment—not a pilot study. We have more than a quarter century of experience with it. It has four principal positions:
A $250,000 no exceptions cap on noneconomic damages only, and I hasten to add because this is endlessly distorted, there is no limit whatsoever on total damages in medical malpractice litigation in the state of California. Last year, we had a $70 million verdict. The only limitation is a $250,000 cap on noneconomic damages. MICRA has a collateral source rule which simply says that if you’ve already been indemnified by a third party for loss, you don’t double dip. Makes a lot of sense when you have a system whose transaction tax is 72 percent. It allows for periodic payments, so that if the point of the indemnity is to reimburse you for expenses over the next 50 years of life, the indemnity is paid over the next 50 years of life. And there’s an attorney contingency fee limitation, which is extremely important, because it transfers money directly from the pockets of the contingency fee attorneys into the injured plaintiff’s.
The plaintiff who wins a million-dollar claim in California takes home $179,000 more than that same plaintiff winning the same million-dollar verdict would in a state with a 40 percent contingency fee. Claims settle one-third faster in California than they do in the rest of the country because you don’t have to spin the wheel of misfortune to debate noneconomic damages. Periodic payments allow the system to absorb large judgments without bankruptcy and to assure that money is available at the time that it’s needed.
And most importantly, MICRA does not in any way impair attorney access. California is a very litigious state. The frequency of malpractice litigation in California is 50 percent higher than the national average. That was true in 1975. It’s true today.
There is no shortage of attorneys who are more than willing to take a claim in California. And indeed, why should there be? An attorney who wins a million-dollar claim in California walks away with a $221,000 fee plus all expenses. An attorney who wins a $250,000 claim in California walks away with a fee of approximately $75,000, plus all expenses. It’s ironic that consumer advocates would argue that the way to ensure legal services are available to all who need them is to keep legal fees high. Why isn’t Ms. Doroshow advocating a national legal care program akin to Medicare, rather than working so hard to maintain 40 and 50 percent contingency fees? You needn’t take my word for it. The same conclusions have been reached by the Congressional Budget Office, by the General Accounting Office, by Health and Human Services, and by the Florida Selection Commission on Medical Malpractice, which unanimously endorsed the precepts of MICRA. I mention that one particularly because that unanimous endorsement includes the vote of Donna Shalala, who I think would be no one’s idea of an insurance company lackey.
The time to act is now. I don’t think people really realize how close we are to the edge of health system collapse. MICRA doesn’t remove access to lawyers, but it does preserve access to doctors. It’s not a perfect solution, but we don’t live in a perfect society. It is a very good solution, and we do not speculate that it works. Thank you.
BC: Doctor, can I ask you, before we open up, I just have one question, a philosophical question, what do, and you can address the audience not me, what is it about the intentions of politicians in Washington or Harrisburg that should determine these damages as opposed to the jury of your peers? How do you address that in this case? You address that one.
RA: Sure. No one is attacking the jury system in the United States, but we need to be really clear what the role of the jury is. The role of the jury is to enforce the law, not to make the law. We trust juries to enforce the law. And if we give juries bad laws to enforce, they will enforce them badly. We don’t allow juries unlimited discretion to assess penalties in other cases. In fact, one of the tenets of the American Revolution was that the power to tax is the power to destroy. We have sentencing guidelines in every other aspect of our legal system. There’s nothing unusual about putting in guidelines to make jury decisions appropriate.
BC: Any questions?
Q: I’m curious that you and others make the point that you’re not talking about limiting economic damages, but economic damages are simply the reimbursement for out of pocket expenses—medical bills, funeral expenses, lost wages. Noneconomic damages, what you want limited, are the real compensation for a long-term, life-altering injury like Linda McDougal, who you probably know as an oncologist, and who was diagnosed, had a double mastectomy. She’s going to be scarred for the rest of her life. The only compensation that goes to long-term injury is noneconomic, and that is what you’re seeking to limit. So no matter what the injury, no matter how horrible the malpractice, how could you want to limit the compensation for the worst instances of malpractice and the more serious injuries?
RA: First of all, it’s remarkable to me that the case of Linda McDougal keeps coming up. Linda McDougal’s interface with tort reform is merely theoretical. Second, there was no malpractice involved in the Linda McDougal case in the sense that there was a clerical error. The biopsies were read correctly, but two biopsies of two patients were mixed up. The system was later changed to correct that. But the more fundamental question is yes, Linda McDougal suffered a terrible tragedy, an unnecessary double mastectomy is, of course, a nightmare.
Tell me how Linda McDougal’s situation would be made acceptable if she got $500,000 instead of $250,000? Or how our health care system would be improved if Linda McDougal got $250 million instead of $250,000? There are some things, which are not adequately compensated by money. And if we wish to have a functioning health care system, a system, which I think we all agree for a number of reasons is teetering on the brink of collapse, then there are going to have to be some limitations.
Today, as I indicated earlier, 2 percent of plaintiffs—2 percent of plaintiffs theoretically like Linda McDougal, who are particularly sympathetic, who have particularly difficult injuries, sometimes due to medical negligence, most often not due to medical negligence—2 percent of plaintiffs take 50 percent of all the indemnity in the system. That is not a sensible solution. Now, a company like The Doctors Company, is a national company. We’re owned by our policyholders. We insure nearly 30,000 physicians across the United States of America. Fewer than 100 claims a year account for 50 percent of all the indemnity that we pay. This is not a sensible solution.
BC: Joanne, do you want to comment on that or the broader question in general?
JD: Linda McDougal has the right like anybody in this country to have her damages determined by a jury, and for any politician or insurance executive to tell her that her damages and the torture that she’s been through, and the lifetime of suffering is worth $250,000 is not only grotesque, but it was flatly rejected by the U.S. Congress who are Republicans and used her case as an example in talking about why they were rejecting this cap when this bill came up on the floor of Congress last year. And then, just briefly, this notion that the health care system is on the verge of collapse due to medical malpractice; medical malpractice premiums and claims account for less than 2 percent of health care cost in this country, and that’s not just according to us, that’s according to the Congressional Budget Office. Not only that, the General Accounting Office and the National Bureau of Economic Research have both looked into this question of whether doctors are leaving the various states as a result of various malpractice laws that are on the books. And in the words of the General Accounting Office, basically, they found that these claims were wildly exaggerated, often false. They themselves made phone calls to five different states to offices where there are claims the doctors had shut their doors and found that they were completely untrue. And then the National Bureau of Economic Research, in August, published basically the same study confirming that this is not true.
There are anecdotal situations, mostly in rural areas, and the reasons the physicians are leaving some of those areas have nothing to do with the tort reform market on the books. They have to do with other issues and other questions. And these are isolated incidents. In some states, there have been attempts to try to assist rural doctors with some of their premiums, like in Oregon, for example.
That’s the way you deal with that question. You don’t take away the rights of somebody like Linda McDougal or children, who suffer the most, and suffer for a lifetime with a catastrophic injury, and tell that family that that suffering is worth $250,000 for the lifetime of that child. So that’s basically how I would respond.
BC: Questions?
Q: If, in fact, the rising premiums are attributable to the flaws in our tort system, why do we have that same situation arise in France, for example, which has no tort system, which has no juries, which treats medical malpractice in a worker comp-like system? And we also have rising premiums and OB/Gyns walking out. These claims...[indistinguishable]
RA: Again, it’s remarkable how spurious arguments continue to be made. No one is attacking the jury system here. What we’re saying is the juries need to be given appropriate laws to enforce.
The fact that you have this kind of problem in France—the fact that the national government of Australia had to step in because by far the largest insurance company in Australia went bankrupt, leaving 60 percent of the doctors in Australia uninsured, regardless of the variations in the claims environment—shows that it is impossible to sustain an insurance system when the losses are unlimited.
Look, if society wants to have unlimited judgments, that’s a choice that society can make. But there are certain consequences. If society wishes to have unlimited judgments, we can do that. But unlimited judgments mean unlimited premiums. Unlimited premiums mean unlimited increases in the cost of health care. Unlimited increases in the cost of health care mean decreased access, and decreased access inevitably hits those who are most vulnerable in our society.
I’d like to respond to a couple of other things that Ms. Doroshow said, because she asked a question, which I would quite like to answer. She said, are we to believe that juries behaved so similarly 10 years apart in the seventies, eighties and nineties? And again, the facts really speak for themselves.
The facts speak for themselves. California in 1975, which was the epicenter of the malpractice crisis, the original malpractice crisis—80 percent of all the medical malpractice litigation in the twentieth century in California was filed between 1970 and 1975. Is that an insurance company crisis or is that a change in behavior? The crisis that was precipitated in the seventies involved a dramatic increase in judgments of a few hundred thousand dollars each. That was enough to dislocate the entire insurance system.
In the eighties, we had a new malpractice crisis when there was a new step up in litigation, both the frequency of litigation and the severity of litigation, and then we had much more frequent incidents on million-dollar claims. Today we live in a society where $200 million malpractice claims have occurred. Virtually every large state has $100 million malpractice verdicts. And every state has malpractice verdicts in the tens of millions of dollars. So has jury behavior changed? Absolutely, positively—jury behavior has changed. Two other points quickly: Ms. Doroshow referred to Prop 103. That is the largest, reddest herring of all. She said that three times in the last year interveners have acted under Prop 103 to reduce rates in California. It’s true. It’s also true that that’s the only three times in history that has occurred.
Moreover, the rate reductions were only a few percent and were inconsequential in terms of the overall rate structure in California. MICRA was passed in 1975. Prop 103 was passed in 1988. First enforcement of Prop 103 that involved insurance companies, medical malpractice insurance companies, was in 1991. The physician-owned medical malpractice insurance companies in the state of California were specifically exempted from having to roll back their rates under 103.
The first enforcement action under 103 came just last year—highly politically motivated and having essentially a negligible impact on rates in the state of California. One final point: The dog food analogy is pretty objectionable. I don’t think the average neurosurgeon in the United States pays $200,000 a year for dog food. I don’t think we should ask the average obstetrician in the United States whether he or she would rather pay $150,000 for a malpractice premium because that money could just as well be spent on dog food.
BC: Yes, sir.
Q: Ms. Doroshow, you said that Congress had essentially rejected the $250,000 cap last year. I’m not sure of your exact words. I remember bills passing in the House, and I don’t think it has ever been considered in the Senate. So which bill was it that Congress passed?
JD: Well, there are several bills. And in each time in the Senate, you’re correct that they have passed the House, but in the Senate, they were not filibustered. They didn’t even proceed to debate. I mean, that’s how objectionable these bills were. If they had proceeded to debate in the Senate, they would have been, probably, they probably would have gone down by, you know, a four-to-one margin. We didn’t even get there because these bills were so objectionable to Republicans in the Senate. And that’s what they said. Arlen Specter—I mean, you know, read his statements.
Q: Republicans?
JD: Republicans.
BC: Okay; any more questions? If you want to wrap up you can. Dr. Anderson, would you like to make any closing statements? Ms. Doroshow?
RA: I think that I was about as clear as I can be in proposing what I believe is an entirely reasonable position on the crisis that affects us today. It’s not, as I indicated, the only crisis in our health care system. But I did say correctly that it’s the crisis in our health care system that is probably the easiest to remedy. If we had a national version if MICRA, we would have an 80/20 solution—not a perfect solution, but an 80/20 solution. And in a society like ours today, an 80/20 solution is pretty remarkable and pretty rare. After we have that solution in hand, after we have stopped the bleeding, we can go on and change the culture. We can go on and change the health care system in other ways. But until we stop the bleeding, the health care system will continue to hemorrhage. One other final point: I’m always troubled by this alleged dichotomy that we hear about insurance companies versus patients’ rights. When you cut through all the rancor, this is not about insurance companies versus patient rights. This is about an assault—an all out attempt to preserve a 40 percent or more contingency fee. And when seen in that light, it’s extremely troublesome, especially by those who are said to be representing consumers.
JD: Well, it’s interesting that I haven’t brought up the contingency issue a single time in this debate. In 2002, over a hundred consumer groups came together and formed a coalition called Americans for Insurance Reform.
And the first step that they took is to write to every single insurance commissioner in the country, as the hard market was coming in, as we saw rates were starting to skyrocket, and physicians were experiencing essentially sticker shock. And we basically laid out fourteen different investigations, audits, and reforms that we asked each one of the insurance commissioners to explore. And very few of them even took the time to respond to the letter. This year, we sent yet another one, which confirmed everything that we had predicted would happen if they didn’t take steps to remedy this insurance problem.
Rates did go up for many physicians. They are being horribly priced out. Meanwhile, insurance companies are making huge profits off the backs of these physicians. Nothing is being done to help them. So once again, as I have in many other forums, I asked physicians and their representatives and their lobbyists to join with the consumer groups that for thirty years have been trying to get this insurance cycle under control because, unless that happens, these kinds of volcanic eruptions and rates are going to continue in the future and this problem’s never going to be solved. So if anybody’s interested who is sitting in the audience, who would like to join us, please come up to me afterwards, and we would be happy to plug you into our efforts. Thank you.
BC: Thank you for coming.
