How Do the State Medical Malpractice Laws Affect the Access to Health Care?

Abstract

With 15 percent of the population in the United States lacking health insurance, significant effort is being made to identify solutions. A variety of responses have been implemented, ranging from changes to the insurance regulatory requirements to tax code revisions to legal system modifications. While a large body of literature addresses the effect of legal system modifications on medical malpractice claims and insurance as well as physician availability, we know of no prior research to investigate the effect on rates of uninsured. We test this relationship and discover that caps on non-economic damages are associated with decreasing rates of uninsured.