HN: Medical liability insurance on the rise

Prague, Sept 20 (CTK) - More and more Czech doctors and hospitals are insuring themselves against their own mistakes as courts are awarding higher and higher damages to patients or the survivors of the dead patients, daily Hosopdarske noviny (HN) writes yesterday.

It writes that the premiums are rocketing, from hundreds of thousands of crowns to millions and even a ten-million premium is no exception.

"The interest of health care providers in this insurance is growing. Now we have 621 insurance policies with doctors or hospitals. Three quarters of them include other than proprietary loss," HN quotes Vaclav Balek, spokesman for the Allianz insurance company, as saying.

"Five years ago we were not offering this type on a large scale because we only had a couple of such policies," Balek said.

Doctors and hospitals have compulsory insurance against proprietary loss, that is a loss that can be translated into money and proved with invoices, HN writes.

It gives as an example the situation where a doctor spoils an operation and the patient cannot work, in which case the financial loss can be calculated. Such damages are usually worth hundreds of thousands of crowns, HN writes.

Of late, however, courts have started awarding other than proprietary damages to patients, or a sort of price for spoilt life that cannot be substantiated with bills, the paper writes.

HN mentions the case of a family whose mother died in hospital. Three weeks ago the court awarded them damages worth three and a half million crowns for spoilt life, the highest sum in Czech history.

"Sixty large hospitals and more than 1200 general practitioners have signed policies for such cases with us. In the past five years mainly the insured sum has been rising. Before it was usually under 400,000 crowns, now it is more than one million and up to ten million in case of hospitals," HN quotes Milan Kana, spokesman for the Kooperativa insurance company, as saying.

($1=19.19 crowns)