The article as you quoted states:

"Texas insurance companies definitely benefited from tort reform. After losing money for years, they started making money big time. "

So, even charging high rates the companies were losing money and now they are recooperating their loses. One thing I know in economics is that after a loss, you first have to recover.

You are quoted "According to a Texas Department of Insurance (TDI) report , the cost of Medical Malpractice Insurance for doctors was 21% lower than regulated insurers wanted in 2000. For hospitals, the state ordered rates reduced by 24%." the main poing is "regulated" and the "State ordered". By ordering the rates lowered, this meant that the covered medial provideres were responsible for more. Here is how it works. You have $750,000 worth of insurance. The state lowers the rates, so what happens. You now only have $250,000 worth of coverage and anything else comes right out of your pocket. Attorneys know that you can not take the risk of a huge jury verdict that will take everything and will now be more likely to settle even the most bogus of cases. Guess what, med mal cases went up.

I am always amazed that the term the "Insurance companies milked the doctors". Most of us are insured through mutuals, which means we are the insurance companies.

As to " In 2003, when reformers cried crisis, if a Texan won a malpractice payout, it averaged $224,652 . Then national average that year was $290,730. Texas had the 37th lowest payout in the country." Important data was intentionally left out. It is not the size of the payouts, rather it was the number of payouts for the reasons I just explained.

There is a great WSJ journal article that explains this better. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121097874071799863.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

Expecting truthful reporting out of this trial lawyers front is expecting way too much

Throckmorton contends that state suppresion of premiums caused providers in TX to incur more personal exposure on med mal claims. No evidence supports this. My research group studied doctors' personal contributions to malpractice payments in tried and settled cases and found they were vanishingly small. I know of no authority studying med mal cases in TX or any other state showing that doctors face much personal exposure. You can find my research group's studies at www.ssrn.com.

MR. Silver:

I would very much like to look at your research. The link you provided does not give access to it. As you know the problem with social science is the elimination and control of variables and as a result MONOVA analysis is the result. Further, conclusions can only be made from the data set chosen and relationships between variables are still illdefined. Because the data sets are often incomplete, they may not represent the whole population.

Please place a link to your peer reviewed and statisically confirmed reseach so that the data sets can methodology can be scrutinized.

The specific questions that we hope the study will answer to a p of 0.05 of less are: if a physicans medmal coverage/occurence is less will they or their insurance provider be more likely to settle? Secondly, if this is the case has it resulted in an increase in total suits filed?

One of my articles appears here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=981192. Another appears here: http://ssrn.com/abstract=983199. Both were published in peer-reviewed journals, respectively, the Journal of Legal Studies and the Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance. We did not examine the frequency of settlement as a function of policy size, and I doubt you could get a handle on this using this dataset, which contains only claims that closed with payments. However, one can quantify the frequency of personal contributions by physicians and their size. Personal contributions are more likely when policies are smaller, but even then they are rare. The dataset we used is publicly available at the website maintained by the Texas Dept. of Insurance.

Thank you so much for posting the links to the papers. I agree with you that the data set used is limited as it highly under represents physicians who did not have claims against them. Further, the data only allows observations of trends within it. True correlation between individual variables can not be assessed as they can not be isolated. Although you did mention changes in tort law during the time of the study which you limited to 1988-1999 rather than the implied 2003 as in the abstract, other variables such as the economic changes in the practice of medicine where not included. Despite this, you did show that there was a trend with a high predictive value of increased personal contributions by physicians as policy limits decreased. You also show very well that there are major spikes in settlement amouts at the level of the policy limits.

I hope that the next few years allow us to have more date with which to draw better conclusions. Til then, our tort system remains "deal or no deal" and how much can you risk. Or better yet, your insurance amount or your house!

Whom should we believe? The "throckmorton" or the law professor from the University of Texas who supports his argument with actual facts, studies and evidence? To throcky, using big words, subterfuge, mischaracterizations, and indecipherable sentences does not hide the fact that you have nothing to support your opinions. However, it does show your arrogance, irrational thinking, intellectual dishonesty and insecurity which seems to be a common thread among the right wing/reactionary/Bush/O'Reilly folks. In other words, your argument is complete b.s. P.S., in Texas, there is something called a homestead exemption. Look it up.