Video – Attorney Mark Kaire Answers If The Number Of Medical Malpractice Claims Are Increasing

Ray Hrdlicka - Presentador - Attorneys.Media

I read, of course, you know, and online that the number of medical malpractice claims have been increasing as of the last many years. Is that… maybe it’s because people are more litigious? Is that true that, you know, there’s an upward slope of claims?

Mark Kaire – Medical Malpractice Attorney – Miami-Dade County, FL

An upward slope of claims? Well, I guess, so that question is really twofold. So, the first thing we have to look at is whether or not we have an increase in either premiums or doctors not being able to get insurance coverage. That falsehood was the pretense for Florida, I’m going to say about 15 or 20 years ago, instituting medical malpractice caps. And we’ve lived with that for about 10 years.

And ultimately the Florida Supreme Court came out with an opinion that there was absolutely no evidence to back up that there was an increase in premiums or doctors’ inability to get medical malpractice coverage or that the state of Florida had a quote-unquote medical malpractice crisis as the insurance companies had pretended in order to get us slapped with these caps, which ultimately were done away by the Florida Supreme Court.

So, the answer to that question is no. You can have frivolous litigation in car accidents, products liability cases to a certain extent, or other types of personal injury. You cannot have that in medical malpractice, really for two reasons.

The first is the pre-suit screening process that we’ve discussed, that you need an affidavit from a medical specialist at the same specialty signing off and telling you that, yes, there was medical malpractice, that that medical malpractice was the causation of the injuries and that those damages are permanent. You’re not going to just get that. So that’s a pre-suit process or that’s a screening process in and of itself.

And secondly, the costs of bringing a medical malpractice case are so significant that lawyers are not going to just willy-nilly going to go ahead and bring a case which they believe is frivolous. It’s just not going to happen.

Because ultimately the people that are going to decide this case, at least for settlement purposes, are going to be doctors. Insurance companies have doctors that review cases for them, and they are going to tell that insurance company or the offending doctor, look, there is zero liability here. This expert that signed this affidavit for the plaintiff isn’t worth his salt. This case has no merit to it. Don’t pay it.

So, that doesn’t happen in medical malpractice cases. You will be hard pressed to find a quote-unquote frivolous medical malpractice case.