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Alabama Medical Malpractice Insurance

You make important decisions every day, just as you trained to do. Should the selection of your medical malpractice insurance for your Alabama practice be any different? You can simplify the process by taking advantage of MyMedicalMalpracticeInsurance.com’s highly trained specialists in Alabama to help you find the best medical malpractice insurance coverage for your needs at the lowest possible cost.

With access to all the leading medical malpractice insurance companies in Alabama, we will make them all compete for your business, in order to get you the best terms at the best rates. We’ve done it for thousands of other physicians and healthcare professionals and we’re ready to do it for you.

Why Alabama Physicians choose My Medical Malpractice Insurance:

• Quotes from the leading Medical Malpractice Insurers in Alabama.
  
  
• Physician Discounts Available for Risk Management, Claims-free and New to Practice.
  
  
• Prior Acts Coverage is included, without purchasing separate tail coverage.
  
  
• Our veteran malpractice liability specialists will shape your policy to fit your needs.
  
  
• Our free Practice Tools: Online Patient Satisfaction Survey System, Certified Professional Healthcare Risk Manager (CPHRM) on staff, plus many other tools to help your practice succeed and grow.
  
  
• We've joined forces with the Medical Liability Monitor -- the nation's leading independent source of Medical Liability Insurance news and all the political, legal and risk management issues that affect the healthcare industry --to publish historical rate data for every city in Alabama. This information offers insight into the Heart of Dixie State’s data trends when making an informed decision on your medical malpractice insurance coverage and carrier. This is just one more reason that we’re the preferred medical malpractice insurance online site for Alabama physicians looking for the best way to lower their rates and find the best coverage.
  
  
• Let our experienced malpractice insurance brokers save you time, money and headaches on your Alabama Medical Malpractice Insurance search.

Medical Malpractice Insurance in Alabama

Medical professional liability insurance premiums in Alabama are moderate, but that was not the case as recently as 18 years ago when a Forbes magazine article dubbed it America’s “Tort Hell.”

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Alabama’s civil justice system was known for its juries’ willingness to hand down large awards, heavy with punitive as well as non-economic damages. While a nationwide study of jury verdicts done during in the 1990s revealed that multi-million dollar punitive damage verdicts were a rare occurrence, that was not the case in Alabama. Between 1991 and 1994, more than 60 punitive damage verdicts exceeded $1 million; another study indicated that civil awards in Alabama had increased by 400 percent from 1985 to 1994.

The curious effect these multi-million dollar punitive and non-economic damage awards had on Alabama’s civil justice system was that as citizens became accustomed to reading or hearing of these large judgments, they became more comfortable granting such awards when sitting on juries themselves. These high-dollar awards in turn drove up the cost a defendant had to pay in order to settle a case. Alabama was a place many medical malpractice insurers were happy to avoid.

Aware of Alabama’s reputation for excessive jury verdicts and expensive settlements, the state’s legislature set out on an agenda focused on reform its tort system. The first legislative victory came in 1987 with the passage of several laws intended to curb the high jury verdicts in medical malpractice cases. Those laws required a plaintiff to show by “clear and convincing” evidence that a defendant acted with “wanton” conduct for the recovery of punitive damages and limited the award of punitive damages to $250,000, limited the award of non-economic damages to $400,000 and limited the award of damages in medical liability cases to $1 million. Almost immediately the new laws restricting recoverable damages were contested by trial lawyers, and in 1991 the caps on punitive and non-economic damages were overturned by the Alabama Supreme Court on the grounds that limiting damage awards in healthcare liability actions violated the right to a jury trial and equal protection provisions of the state constitution. Five years later, the Alabama Supreme Court overturned the damage limits in wrongful death liability actions on identical grounds.

With it abundantly clear that the Alabama Supreme Court, as it was constituted, would never allow legislated damage caps to stand, tort reform advocates contributed to and campaigned for Republican Perry Hooper Sr. in the 1994 election for the Alabama Supreme Court’s chief justice. Running on a pro-tort reform platform, Hooper defeated sitting chief justice Sonny Hornsby. Following elections in 1996 and 1998, Republicans gained control of the Alabama Supreme Court for the first time since its establishment in 1820. This new conservative court was eager to reevaluate various legal issues of concern to the business community, such as the constitutionality of punitive damage caps and excessive punitive damage awards. Recognizing the court’s new political makeup, the Alabama Legislature once again took to drafting laws intended to reign in lawsuit abuse.

In 1999, Alabama’s House of Representatives and the Senate passed legislation to limit punitive damages at three times the compensatory damages or $500,000, whichever is greater. Everyone expects the law to inevitably come before the high court again. However, optimists speculate that due to the now conservative high court would likely view the cap positively.

The judicial and legislative reforms that followed the political shakeup in the Alabama court system produced an improved legal climate by the year 2000, but then the tort reform train began to lose its steam. That was the case until the conservative political wave that characterized the 2010 elections. An influx of elected Tea Party-types brought with them a renewed interest in lawsuit reform, and the state passed its first tort reform laws in more than a decade during the 2011 legislative session when Gov. Robert Bentley signed five new bills. The new batch of legislation reduces the statute of repose in civil cases—akin to the statute of limitations in a criminal case—from 13 years to seven; prohibits forum-shopping in wrongful death lawsuits; and conforms the state’s expert witness rules to the stricter federal standard.

There’s little question that Alabama has improved its civil litigation climate. A task force conducted by the state’s commissioner of insurance concluded “Alabama’s days as Tort Hell could be over,” and a recent article in the ABA Journal described Alabama as a state where “the pendulum has swung and the state now leads the country in what critics call limited justice.”

As Alabama improved its civil litigation reputation, the state’s healthcare community began to see an easing in its medical malpractice insurance premiums as well as an influx of insurers willing to write in the state. For this reason, it is crucial to a physician’s business success to work with an experienced medical malpractice insurance broker. Only an experienced broker with access to all the major insurers will be able to shop your coverage for the best terms at the best price.

 
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