Reasons to Support and Uphold Special Liability Protection

For Emergency Care Providers

as stated in SB3

• Emergency medicine is an essential public service that involves unique challenges and circumstances that should be recognized and addressed in state medical liability statutes.

• Georgia joined several other states that have recognized the unique needs and circumstances of emergency care and has enacted special, model liability protections for emergency care providers, including placing lower caps on non-economic damages and requiring a higher standard of negligence that must be proven in emergency care cases.

• SB-3 is delivering on the promise of more malpractice insurance competition.  Many more professional liability insurance companies are now offering rate quotes to Georgia emergency medicine physicians due to the passage of SB3.  MAG Mutual has announced 10% insurance savings for Georgia physicians with rate reductions and dividend payments. Whereas there used to be only 1 or 2 carriers to choose from, since malpractice reform that number has more than doubled. 

• The other specialists providing essential on-call services to emergency patients are often in critically short supply.  Reversing SB-3 will only further discourage these specialists from agreeing to provide vital on-call services to emergency patients.  The only way many physicians will return to seeing acute, life-threatening Emergency patients is the continued promise of the appropriate, balanced provisions in SB-3.

• SB-3 needs more time to continue the progress made.  3 years since signature is not enough time to reverse many decades of inequity.

• Emergency physicians and acute on-call specialists must make immediate, lifesaving decisions regarding diagnosis and treatment without the benefit of a prior relationship to the patient and often without any knowledge of the patient’s medical history.

• Emergency physicians are mandated by federal law to treat anyone who comes to an emergency department, regardless of the nature, severity or complexity of their condition.

• Emergency physicians treat everyone regardless of their ability to pay and provide a large and growing amount of uncompensated and undercompensated care. 

• The high-risk nature of emergency medicine resulted in escalating liability insurance rates.  These skyrocketing costs coupled with lost revenue from uncompensated care seriously threaten the future viability of the emergency care system.

• Everyone will need emergency care at some point, whether they are young or old, rich or poor, insured or uninsured.  It is imperative that the emergency care system remains viable and capable of providing high quality lifesaving care to the entire population.