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Variability in Medical Malpractice Payments: Is the Compensation Fair?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Frank A. Sloan  and
Chee Ruey Hsieh
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Abstract

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This study uses a framework in which disputants' litigation decisions are based on optimizing expected returns and minimizing losses to analyze outcomes of medical malpractice disputes—the probability of payment, stage of resolution, and amounts paid, based on closed medical malpractice claims from Florida and jury verdict reporter abstracts from five jurisdictions. Using judgments of an expert panel and other indicators, the analysis reveals that cases are more likely to result in paid claims when the defendant appears to be liable. By contrast, cases brought to satisfy a claimant motive of vindication are less likely to result in payment; such cases have a higher probability of being tried. Claimants with more serious injuries tend to receive higher payments. Payment appears equitable vertically, but there is appreciable variability in payment for similar injuries which may reflect horizontal inequities.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , 1990 , pp. 997 - 1039
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

This research was supported in part by Grant No. 12412 from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Support for assembling the data was provided by Grant No. HSS 1 R01 HS05693 from the National Center for Health Services Research, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (now the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research). We wish to thank Dr. Laurence Tancredi, Health Science Center at Houston, University of Texas, and his colleagues for providing assessments of injury avoidability on a subsample of cases. We are thankful to Randall Bovbjerg, the Urban Institute, and Penny Githens and David Partlett, Vanderbilt University, for their advice.

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