Insurance Companies, Insurace Policy

Is more data really going to clarify these observations? Will another study finally add the critical data point proving that our society has a "greater societal propensity to sue," that we have developed a "lottery mentality?" Everybody who can read a newspaper knows that the legal system is broken when it comes to jury awards.

Sure, doctors sometimes make mistakes, and that is what insurance is supposed to cover, but can any insurance product be reasonably priced when juries routinely award settlements in the tens of millions of dollars?

An examination of real  insurance causes, rather than the kind of navel-gazing that produced the GAO's reserve-policy argument, leads us to the inevitable conclusion that there is no future—neither for insurers, nor for the insured—in charging the kind of malpractice insurance rates that can actually pay for such judicial abuses. The only long-term solution involves fixing the nature of claimant expectations. They should expect settlement, not a one-way ticket to Millionaire Row.

The fact is that people die, and medical science can only do so much about it. Not all medical procedures are guaranteed to succeed. Society has to take responsibility for itself, and sometimes, when things go horribly wrong, the "victim" is the only one to blame. You can't smoke cigarettes your whole life and expect the insurance company to pay millions because they could have prolonged your life one day longer if they had only done one more very expensive procedure. There should be caps on jury awards, and a claimant's individual negligence should be taken into account in determining awards.

As I said, calculating premiums is not rocket science. It is also not the path to utopia, no matter how many billions juries award in pursuit of public moralit