Stanford law review
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Stanford law review · Feb 2019
"Sorry” Is Never Enough: How State Apology Laws Fail to Reduce Medical Malpractice Liability Risk.
Based on case studies indicating that apologies from physicians to patients can promote healing, understanding, and dispute resolution, thirty-nine states (and the District of Columbia) have sought to reduce litigation and medical malpractice liability by enacting apology laws. Apology laws facilitate apologies by making them inadmissible as evidence in subsequent malpractice trials. The underlying assumption of these laws is that after receiving an apology, patients will be less likely to pursue malpractice claims and will be more likely to settle claims that are filed. ⋯ This Article provides critical new evidence on the role of apology laws by examining a dataset of malpractice claims obtained directly from a large national malpractice insurer. This dataset includes substantially more information than is publicly available, and thus presents a unique opportunity to understand the effect of apology laws on the entire litigation landscape in ways that are not possible using only publicly available data. Decomposing medical malpractice liability risk into the frequency of claims and the magnitude of those claims, we examine the malpractice claims against 90% of physicians in the country who practice within a particular specialty over an eight-year period.