Health Affairs

Posting date: May 31, 2005

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Health Affairs, 10.1377/hlthaff.w5.240
Copyright © 2005 by Project HOPE

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The Growth Of Physician Medical Malpractice Payments: Evidence From The National Practitioner Data Bank

Amitabh Chandra ^1*, Shantanu Nundy ², Seth A. Seabury ³

¹ Amitabh Chandra is an assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire, a senior research associate at the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences, Dartmouth Medical School; and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
² Shantanu Nundy is a medical student at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
³ Seth Seabury is an economist at the Institute for Civil Justice (ICJ) at RAND in Santa Monica, California.

^*Corresponding author.

Abstract

We used data from the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) to study the growth of physician malpractice payments. Judgments at trial account for 4 percent of all malpractice payments; settlements account for the remaining 96 percent. The average payment grew 52 percent between 1991 and 2003 (4 percent per year) and now exceeds $12 per capita each year. These increases are consistent with increases in the cost of health care. A preoccupation with data on judgments, extreme awards, or specific specialties results in an incomplete understanding of the growth of physician malpractice payments.

Key Words: Business Of Health, Consumer Issues, Health Reform, Legal/Regulatory Issues, Physicians, State/Local Issues, Health Spending

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