Our View of Med Mal Insurer Activity in Nevada

It is an unfortunate fact that in a competitive market, some businesses will engage in advertising practices that may deviate slightly from being entirely factual. There have been claims put forth by some insurers that simply are not true, but it appears that they rely upon the fact that you will simply be too busy to learn the truth. I am going to take the liberty of dispelling a few of the myths being propagated by other insurers in the State.

• There is a company that consistently claims in their advertisements to be the “Only Doctor Owned” insurance company in Nevada. This is simply untrue. There are several, Nevada Docs being among them. 
• Very recently a flyer went out announcing that a certain company had lowered its rates and now had the lowest filed rates. We find this interesting at Nevada Docs, due to the fact that our rates are lower, specialty for specialty, than those of the company making this claim.
• The softening market in Nevada is part of a trend in insurance, where Premium Rates follow a cyclical pattern. At this time we find ourselves in a “soft market”. A “soft market” is a period when underwriting standards are relaxed and rates are discounted to levels not consistent with the current losses being experienced by the industry. This creates a similar situation to 2001/2002, where powerful, Out of State insurers engaged in a Premium price war and put locally owned companies at risk because the premium were forced to compete with was actually lower than their cost! Their activities resulted in a situation where the market was no longer profitable for Nevada-based carriers. A little later when those carriers abandoned writing medical malpractice insurance and fled the state, an insurance catastrophe ensued that few will forget.

The current “soft market” is not supported by the realities of the Closed Claim data reports put out by the Nevada Division of Insurance. In addition, the number of Clark County District Court Medical Malpractice Filings has actually failed to decrease, as trial lawyers said they would with the introduction of Tort Reform, even excepting the GI cases filed several years ago.