Investigators at Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria Detail Findings in Economics (Courts, Scheduled Damages, and Medical Malpractice Insurance)

Health Policy and Law Daily

2019 APR 25 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Health Policy and Law Daily -- Current study results on Economics have been published. According to news reporting originating in Reggio di Calabria, Italy, by NewsRx journalists, research stated, “We study how the functioning of the judicial system affects the availability and affordability of medical liability insurance, as proxied by the number of insurers and the premiums paid. We use two unique datasets collected in Italy from 2000 to 2010.”

The news reporters obtained a quote from the research from the Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria, “Using the first dataset-insurance contracts for hospitals-we estimate the average treatment effect of schedules on insurers and premiums paid, conditional on judicial efficiency and proxied by different measures. Our identification rests on the partial overlap between healthcare districts and judicial districts, meaning that the caseload of a court and malpractice events at the healthcare provider level are not perfectly correlated. On average, the adoption of schedules does not produce any significant effect on insurers or on premiums paid. However, adopting schedules has a robust and significant effect on the number of insurers, but only in inefficient courts. We further investigate these findings using a second dataset comprising 17,578 malpractice insurance claims.”

According to the news reporters, the research concluded: “We find evidence of a composition effect among claims that is triggered by higher levels of judicial inefficiency: As a court’s inefficiency increases, the likelihood for a case to not be decided on the merits decreases and the levels of reserve and recovery per claim decrease.”

For more information on this research see: Courts, Scheduled Damages, and Medical Malpractice Insurance. Empirical Economics, 2018;55(2):831-854. Empirical Economics can be contacted at: Physica-Verlag Gmbh & Co, PO Box 10 52 80, 69042 Heidelberg, Germany. (Springer - www.springer.com; Empirical Economics - http://www.springerlink.com/content/0377-7332/)

Our news correspondents report that additional information may be obtained by contacting V. Grembi, Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria, Reggio Di Calabria, Italy.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-017-1279-5. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.