Here is the synopsis of our sample research paper on Malpractice Crisis in Pennsylvania?. Have the paper e-mailed to you 24/7/365.
Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 9 page paper discussing a crisis that in 2006 appears to be abating. In the early years of the new century, Pennsylvania lost not only insurers but also physicians who chose to stop practicing medicine rather than pay greatly increased malpractice insurance premiums. Insurers exited the malpractice segment of their industry, leaving little competition and driving up premium costs to astronomical levels. Premiums are coming down as high premiums attract greater numbers of insurers. The paper is an exercise in critical analysis with five specific steps, the last of which is the conclusion that states that were most affected, including Pennsylvania, need to address the political and business infrastructure problems that allowed the crisis to develop. Bibliography lists 8 sources.
Page Count:
9 pages (~225 words per page)
File: CC6_KSmedPAcrisis.rtf
Buy This Term Paper »
Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
insurers but also physicians who chose to stop practicing medicine rather than pay greatly increased malpractice insurance premiums. Events created a seemingly never-ending cycle: patient wins a large-payout lawsuit;
physicians seek to protect themselves in the event of future lawsuits by ordering unnecessary tests to cover all bases. This drives up the cost of health care, of course,
placing further pressures on patient insurers and hospitals and ultimately driving down physicians real incomes. Even those determined to continue in the profession ultimately found themselves faced with the
realities of making payroll, moving to a more favorable location, leaving the profession or even practicing without malpractice insurance. The malpractice insurance crisis
in Pennsylvania was quite real and is not totally over. By January 2005, however, it was a crisis in decline as nearly 32 percent of new insurers in the
state were offering malpractice insurance (Kersh, 2006). Step One - Overview A report from the Government Accounting Office (GAO) in 2001 concluded there
was no insurance crisis, that physicians incomes were declining as a result of market influences and that malpractice insurance should be regarded only as a cost of doing business (Kersh,
2006). Superficially the conclusions of the GAO report were factual, yet not correct in that it failed to consider the effects of a number of contributing factors to the
change in health care systems throughout the entire country. Another insurance crisis that continues to build is that of uninsured individuals, the number of which roughly doubles year to
year and currently stands at nearly 46 million (Overview, 2006). For their part, practicing physicians have been highly dissatisfied with conditions for some
...