Is the Size of Malpractice Settlements Rising?Are Malpractice Settlements Increasing?|Is the Size of Malpractice Settlements Increasing, Decreasing or Staying the Same?}

According to Gary Wais, a Baltimore malpractice lawyer with Wais Law, a Baltimore malpractice law firm Maryland malpractice settlements are going up slightly as the cap is lifted by 15,000 dollars each year. The cap, which attorney Wais is referring to is the legal cap on non-economic damages awarded in medical malpractice cases.

Non-economic or intangible damages such as the pain, loss, embarrassment and inconvenience of the injury have often swayed juries emotionally and led them to assign high sums to the non-economic damage portion of malpractice cases. Doctors have claimed that these large settlements are driving up the cost of medical care. Insurance companies claim the large pay-outs in medical malpractice cases for pain and suffering and other non-economic damages have required them to sharply increase the cost of medical malpractice insurance. As a result of these complaints, state legislators put caps on the amount of non-economic damages that could be awarded. The legal caps are different in every state, some states, for example, have no caps, some states have caps on physician fees and on punitive damages and seven states have repealed the caps , finding them to be unconstitutional.

According to accurate studies, malpractice claims have been responsible for only a fraction of the rising medical care costs. According to many of the giant insurers, medical malpractice caps do help to control spending, but practically speaking they only lead to a 1% savings in costs. But rising medical costs and rising malpractice insurance premiums far exceed one per cent.

Recently, there has been a move in some states to repeal the payment caps. The caps have been attacked as being unconstitutional in that they put unnatural controls on the thinking of juries and judges during the trial process. As one lawmaker put it,

"Damage caps (which are essentially artificial and arbitrary limits placed on the amount of financial compensation that a victim of medical malpractice can receive) completely negate the judgment and intelligence of juries, who are trusted enough to vote in officials and put people to death."

Judges as well as juries are unable to exercise their full independent thought during malpractice trials. Every case of malpractice is different and has its own unique facts and circumstances, and it is reasonable to assume that occasionally a Judge will feel that a plaintiff deserves more in no-economic damage than the state cap will allow. While seven states, as noted above, have alredy repealed the caps, this past November of 2010 the Maryland Appellate court turned down a similar effort to repeal the caps in Maryland. Currently the caps for non-economic damages in Maryland are limited to slightly under 700,000, however, that figure does not entirely preclude the possibility of monster settlements being awarded by courts.

In a recent case in Baltimore County, for example, a family was awarded 13,000,000 dollars when their child was born with severe cerebral palsy, after their physician failed to inform them of all their options during the later stages of the pregnancy. In this case, the large settlement was compensation for the lifelong cost of medical treatment for the severely injured child In the face of non-economic damage caps. Juries have been known to increase the amount of money awarded for economic damages as compensation for the cap on the non-economic damages.

While theoretically malpractice settlements might be bolstered by large penalty damage assessments levied against Doctors who acted with malicious intent, in fact, this rarely occurs. To win penalty damages in Maryland, for example, a claimant would have to show that the physician acted with malice against the patient, and this rarely occurs. While physicians guilty of malpractice have, by definition, rendered substandard care to their patient, they generally have no particular grudge against the victim of their negligence.

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According to Gary Wais, a Baltimore malpractice lawyer with Wais Law, a Baltimore malpractice law firm, Maryland malpractice settlements are going up 15,000 dollars each year.

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