How Florida Legislation Affects Medical Malpractice Claims

Florida Medical Malpractice Attorneys

Every year in the Florida Legislature and in Congress business and insurance interests work to enact legislation that takes away your rights or significantly limits what you may recover from negligent persons or negligent professionals.

This web page is dedicated to informing our clients and the public in general about how proposed legislation will affect you.

One example in recent years stems from the efforts of healthcare providers to significantly limit the amount of damages that a person injured by a negligent healthcare provider may recover. The basis of this legislation stems from what physicians call “frivolous lawsuits”. But the fact of the matter is that lawyers cannot afford to undertake frivolous medical malpractice cases, nor should they, because of the tremendous expense involved in having a case reviewed by medical experts because in Florida, like most other states, before you may sue a health professional for malpractice, you must have your case reviewed by an expert in the same or similar field and he or she must sign an affidavit that there are grounds to initiate a claim for medical malpractice.

Studies performed by universities and independent think-tanks bear out the fact that the number of malpractice cases today are down from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s and that the reason for skyrocketing malpractice premiums are attributable to loses suffered by the malpractice insurance industry due to recent down turns in the stock market; not from frivolous lawsuits.

In Florida, in 2003, in response to the demands of doctors that legislation was necessary to curb frivolous lawsuits, the Florida Senate undertook to find out the true basis for the rise in malpractice premiums and took sworn testimony. When that happened, no one from the medical industry would step forward and claim that the increase in malpractice premiums were as a result of frivolous lawsuits.

Notwithstanding, the Florida Legislature in 2003 did enact caps on non-economic damages that injured parties may recover from negligent health professionals. Today, the most that any injured party, or their survivors in the event of death, may recover is $500,000.00 from a physician or $750,000.00 from a hospital in the absence of extraordinary circumstances. Of course, these caps only affect the most horribly injured people or their survivors of those that die from medical malpractice since the caps do not affect those who do not suffer horrible injuries.

This web page will provide you with additional information in the future. If you would like to see Avera & Smith address a particular area of the law on this web page, e-mail us at mavera@avera.com and we will try our best to put information on this web page to keep you, and everyone else, informed about important legislation that could affect you and your family.