November 27, 2006

The Ohio medical malpractice claims report, discussed by Walter a few days ago, is now on-line.

Walter's $281,764,938 figure omits the over $113 million paid in defense expenditures for claims, and even that figure is an underestimate, because about records for allocated legal expenses to claims are incomplete. In either event, if a plaintiffs' attorney collects an average of 35% per claim (perhaps an underestimate), Ohio doctors and patients are paying lawyers over $211 million to administer a system that resulted in $183 million in compensation to patients. Over ten percent of that was for emergency room liability.

The effect of recent malpractice reform in Ohio is as yet unknown, because the cases most likely to be affected by caps tend to be the cases that take several years to litigate.

The Ohio data is superior to data previously made available in Texas and Florida because its inclusion of data for the self-insured.