State-Based Survey of Malpractice Premiums: Implications for Medicare Physician Payment Policy (Revised)

摘要

The goal of the study is to provide HCFA with a set of premium data including the major companies selling malpractice insurance to physicians in each state or insurance rating area. The report reviews the data collection process and describes the construction of the premium database. The composition of the data in terms of types of companies is compared with HCFA's data. These data are used to compute the rate of change in premiums over the years covered for all companies and for physician-owned and for-profit companies separately. These results are contrasted with HCFA's estimates for the same period. Finally an MGPCI based on the newly collected data but following the same conceptual approach as used in the index contained in the MFS is computed. This allows an examination of the impact of the change in data (i.e., more and different companies and later years) without introducing other potential refinements in the MGPCI. These refinements include expanding the number of specialties whose premiums are used in the computation and extending the PCF-adjustments to all states with funds as opposed to limiting them to only states with mandatory participation.