GAO report calls liability crisis localized

AMA questions the study, noting that it focuses on only five of the 19 states the Association says are in a full-blown crisis.

By Tanya Albert, AMNews staff. Sept. 22/29, 2003.

For now, rising medical liability rates have affected health care access on a local scale, not on a "widespread basis," a recent General Accounting Office report found. But the nonpartisan government agency said it was essential to closely monitor how liability insurance premiums are impacting patients' access to care.

The GAO studied nine states, five of which are on the American Medical Association's list of states experiencing a medical liability crisis. It found that while local problems exist, reports of physicians retiring early, discontinuing services or moving out of state couldn't be substantiated or didn't have a big effect on access to care.

"Although some reports have received extensive media coverage, in each of the five [crisis] states, we found that actual numbers of physician departures were sometimes inaccurate or involved relatively few physicians," the GAO stated in its report, "Medical Malpractice: Implications of Rising Premiums on Access to Health Care."

For example, some physicians said they had reduced high-risk spinal surgeries and mammograms. But GAO officials said that when they reviewed Medicare data and talked to doctors who reportedly were affected, they did not find that access to services was widely impacted.

The AMA questioned the report's finding that difficulties aren't widespread. The small number of states studied doesn't give an adequate picture of overall trends, and some of the data are too old to be relied upon, the Association stated.