still the national model

Before California's landmark Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA) passed in 1975, a medical malpractice insurance crisis gripped California. Unable to afford soaring liability premiums, thousands of healthcare providers, particularly in high-risk specialties such as obstetrics and neurosurgery, quit practicing in the state. As they lost access to affordable care, many California patients suffered, especially women and those in rural areas.

Because MICRA protects access to care, California now has some of the lowest malpractice premiums in the United States and the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Hospital Association (AHA) hail it as a "model."

"It is reliably estimated by entities as diverse as the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Milliman and Robertson, the Florida Governor's Select Task Force on Healthcare Professional Liability Insurance, and the American Academy of Actuaries that passage of reforms similar to MICRA in states currently lacking such statutes would result in premium savings of 25 to 30 percent annually."

Yale Journal Case Study 2004,
"Effective Legal Reform and the Malpractice Insurance Crisis"

Other states are not so lucky. In 2004, the AMA identified 20 states as being in "a full-blown medical liability crisis." It further described that in these states "patients continue to lose access to care... obstetricians and rural family physicians no longer deliver babies... (and) high-risk specialists no longer provide trauma care or perform complicated surgical procedures."

Attachments:

• Health Coalition on Liability and Access touts MICRA as an early model of successful reform (pdf)
• Yale Journal case study examines MICRA as effective legal reform (pdf)