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How much did it hurt? St. Paul exits the medical liability market

It hurt a lot in some states. In others -- even where the nation's second-largest carrier insured a big percentage of physicians -- the pain barely registered.

By Tanya Albert, amednews staff. July 8/15, 2002.

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It's been more than six months since executives of the St. Paul Companies told nearly 41,000 physicians that they were pulling out of the medical liability insurance market.

The company said it would cover physicians until their contracts ran out, giving some physicians plenty of time to come up with a new insurer and others just months.

The first wave of physicians has already finished its search for a new carrier. For some doctors, it was as simple as comparison shopping between insurers left in the state and choosing a new one.

But in states where a number of medical liability insurers have already pulled out of the volatile market or exited the business because they've gone bankrupt, there is little competition. For physicians there, finding medical liability coverage hasn't been easy.

Some doctors, faced with paying tens of thousands of dollars in tail coverage, decided to retire early. Younger doctors picked up and moved across state lines. Others have pulled together the money they need to pay for insurance for now, but are uncertain they'll be able to keep paying pricey rates in the future.

At a different time, losing St. Paul may not have had a big impact. But smaller companies had been exiting the market for months. When St. Paul made its announcement in December 2001, it drew nationwide attention to liability crises in several states. Mainstream media -- local and national -- started to take note of the problems physicians were having finding insurance in some states, particularly West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Nevada. [...]