LIABILITY CRISIS

A budding crisis was steamrolling towards a full-blown catastrophe in 2003. Patients were losing their doctor and doctors were losing their liability insurer.

Unbridled lawsuits turned entire regions of the state into high-risk areas to practice medicine. From the Gulf Coast to the border to North Texas, communities were having trouble attracting and retaining medical specialists. The number of doctors willing to take emergency call was dwindling. Our most sick and injured patients were increasingly finding it difficult to get the timely and specialized care they needed.

Hospitals across the Texas were turning away ambulances because of a critical shortage of doctors and nurses, as liability costs rose as much as 50 percent in a single year.

• Doctors had stopped taking emergency call out of fear answering such a call would make them vulnerable to a career-threatening lawsuit.
• Often patients had to be transferred to a distant hospital to get the care they needed. Meanwhile, family members had to get a leave from their job or stay in a hotel to see their hospitalized loved one.
• Many pregnant women couldn’t get the pre-natal care they needed. Meanwhile,
• Doctors who couldn’t afford rising liability premiums found it prudent to close their practice.

Hospitals across Texas were turning away ambulances because of a critical shortage of doctors and nurses, as liability costs rose as much as 50 percent in a single year.

Between 1999 and 2002, thirteen of the state’s 17 physician liability carriers went out of business, left the state or began withdrawing from the market due to mounting losses. More than 6,000 Texas physicians were left scrambling to find medical liability insurance. Without insurance they would lose hospital privileges.

Half of the nursing homes in the state had gone bare—unable to find liability coverage.

It was in response to this growing crisis that the Texas Legislature passed sweeping medical lawsuit reforms in June of 2003.