To blame attorneys for the rising cost of insurance is a true red herring perpetuated by the insurance industry. The fact is that around 9/11, the stock market and investments took a dive. As we all should know from our business 101 classes, insurnace companies do not make any profit off of their premiums -- in fact, in the long run, if you ran an insurance company with just premiums and payouts, it would go under really fast.

Insurance companies make their money through investments. The fact is, that when their investments started to go south, they had to get money from somewhere else -- their customers.

It is very easy for them to point their fingers at trial attorneys and a few nutsy jury verdicts and tell us all that "There is the problem!". But that is simply not the case. Absolutely nothing has changed in tort law and insurance really in the last 10 years. However, only over the last 4 or so have rates really started climbing.

Also, if you want to look at medical insurance specifically, you have a broken system. The system does not hold doctors accountable when they cost it money. The fact is that about a small number of doctors (that still have their licenses) actually account for the vast majority of claims.

In our state, it is especially untrue that medical malpractice suits bring overly damaging verdicts. Insurance companies know that in our state, due to the amount of negative publicity and general public perception about trial lawyers and medical malpractice that Oklahoma juries are VERY unfavorable to handing out big verdicts.

Harvard study done in 1991 concluded that as far as medical malpractice goes, the fault is largely with the doctors, and that the real problem is that they are "not sued enough". It also gave an alarming statistic that doctors through negligence/mistakes kill as many as 80,000 patients per year in the United States.

__________________
It's a friendlier OKCTalk!