Malpractice risk, by physician specialty
A new paper in NEJM by Anupam Jena, Seth Seabury, Darius Lakdawalla, and Amitabh Chandra illuminates many of the important aspects of malpractice risk: how it varies by specialty, how many claims lead to payments, the size of payments, the chance of a claim in a year and over a career, etc. Accordin
Choice Inconsistencies among the Elderly: Evidence from Plan Choice in the Medicare Part D Program, by Jason Abaluck and Jonathan Gruber (AER) We evaluate the choices of elders across their insurance options under the Medicare Part D Prescription Drug plan, using a unique dataset of prescription dru
Most preventable medical errors do not result in a paid claim
Paid physician malpractice claims for adverse events in 2009 (from Bishop, Ryan & Casalino in this week’s JAMA): Inpatient 4910 Outpatient 4448 Both 966 Total 10,739 By way of comparison (my calculations): Incidence Number of US hospitals 5,795 <1 per hospital/year Number of admissions 37,479,709 0.
