Author Archive | David Hyman

A majority of Americans obtain health insurance through their place of employment, or the place of employment of an immediate family member. The Census Bureau provides more detail in Figure 7, here. However, small employers, and employers in certain sectors of the economy (e.g., retail and agriculture) are much less likely to offer coverage. In […]

My next set of posts will be on the impact of damages caps on access to medical services. Because it is hard to measure access directly, and most of the available measures lack political salience, the debate usually focuses on the number and specialty of physicians practicing in the state. This is a problematic measure […]

Ok, one last posting on cap design, before I move on to the impact of caps on physician supply. As I noted previously, when California adopted the first non-econ cap in 1975, it set the level at $250,000, without an inflation adjustment. That approach has anchored subsequent debates over non-econ caps. Most state damage caps […]

On to cap design. We

Today, I want to focus on cap design. But first, one clarification from yesterday. Of course, we should expect caps on non-economic damages to hit those with large non-economic damages harder. How much harder is a different question

Ok, so today I will be much shorter, and start right up with our findings. I ended my last post with a bunch of points, including our estimation that the Texas cap will reduce payouts in tried cases by 27%, and settled cases by 18% (assuming no change in the volume and mix of cases). […]

Yesterday, I reviewed some background on damages caps. Today, I want to focus on the effect of damages caps on payouts. Of course, payouts are not the only thing worth studying, as the comments to my first posting reflect. Access to medical services might well be affected by a cap. So might malpractice premiums

Thanks Eugene, for inviting me to join the conspiracy