The ASA Committee on Professional Liability reports annually on trends in malpractice insurance costs for physician anesthesiologists. The Closed Claims Project conducted a survey of malpractice insurers from May-July 2015 on behalf of the committee. Twenty-three medical liability insurance companies providing professional liability insurance to more than 16,000 physician anesthesiologists in the U.S. responded to our questions.
Similar to survey results from 2014,1 insurance companies reported that most anesthesiologists have policy limits of $1 million per occurrence and $3 million per year. Twenty-six percent of insurance carriers reported that their most common policy had higher limits, while 9 percent reported lower limits. Eighty-two percent of responding carriers offered claims-made policies either exclusively or for the majority of their insureds, while 18 percent wrote mostly or exclusively occurrence policies. In 2014, 14 percent of carriers offered occurrence policies.1 In addition to offering individual policies, 22 of the 23 responding...
