West Virginia Commissioner Eyes Tort Reform

When asked about a recent report from the American Tort Reform Association that singled out West Virginia as the only statewide “judicial hellhole” in a related report, Bringing Justice to Judicial Hellholes 2003,” West Virginia Insurance Commissioner Jane Cline said she really had no comment for the record, but it did catch her attention.

In her role as commissioner, Cline oversees a department that has heard first-hand of some of the challenges both companies and agents face in the state when it comes to dealing with tort reform and providing affordable coverage for medical professionals.

As we continued the discussion, Cline noted that “with respect to the insurance issues, we’ve had a significant amount of time spent on medical malpractice. The legislature has taken a number of aspects with respect to medical malpractice. In the last session, there was also a venue law passed because there have been a number of discussions with respect to West Virginia being considered a place where ‘venue shopping’ was going on.”

An American Medical Association report last year listed the 50 states and where they fell from no or few problems in medical malpractice to those states in crisis. West Virginia fell in the crisis range.

“We’ve been spending a lot of time on medical liability and in addition to the provisions that were put into place with respect to civil justice reform, there was also a provision put into the law to form a West Virginia domiciled physicians mutual and that physicians’ mutual would take the existing book of business that is currently insured by what we call ‘BRIM 2′ which is our Board of Risk and Insurance Management,” Cline said. “Those were physicians who were unable to find coverage in the commercial market but it wasn’t because they were an extreme risk or anything, it was that we didn’t have available carriers. We’re working on a formation of our own physicians’ mutual.”

When asked if physicians have had to leave the state to practice elsewhere due to lack of affordable insurance, Cline noted “I know of physicians who left to practice elsewhere. I know of physicians who limited their practice or retired earlier than they would have. The hope is that the changes that were made will help to begin to stabilize the market.”

Cline, when asked if reforms will be a positive a year from now, noted “I’m hopeful we’ll begin to start seeing the impacts from the medical liability reforms and just the fact that we took action and we did provide an alternative for physicians that were unable to get coverage.”

Topics Virginia West Virginia