Between the pooled risk insurance company and a second company formed a long time ago in Bermuda, this is where the payment settlements will come from.  As many as 10,000 patients may be splitting the money so when you imagebreak it down that’s not as large as it seems with the big dollar amount but still a good good chunk of change for sure. 

If you need a quick refresher this case was all about a gynecologist secretly taping patients with Dr. Nikita Levy, who committed suicide in February 2013 after being caught with hundreds of pelvis pictures.  This was pretty sleazy as the doctor wore a pen camera around his neck to get his pictures. 

Women joining the suit must describe how much time they spent with Levy, whether a nurse was present, and any sexual, verbal or physical abuse.   The doctor had over ten computer hard drives of pictures.  BD 


When Johns Hopkins Hospital agreed this week to a $190 million settlement with thousands of patients who were secretly photographed during gynecological exams, it put a number of prominent East Coast medical institutions on the hook.

Hopkins joined with hospitals and schools affiliated with Yale, Cornell and Columbia universities and the University of Rochester years ago to create a pair of insurance companies to save money and pool risk, but they now face one of the largest claim settlements of its kind.

Hopkins has said little about the settlement with patients of Dr. Nikita Levy, who worked in a Hopkins clinic in East Baltimore, and how it will be paid, aside from saying it would be covered by insurance and the hospital's quality of care wouldn't be affected.

The details of the insurance arrangements are complex, and the specifics of the settlement have not been disclosed. But MCIC Vermont and Medical Centre Insurance Company Ltd., based in Bermuda, likely will be responsible for about $25 million, according to documents filed with Vermont regulators. Both companies are owned by the medical centers.

The remainder would be paid by additional coverage the insurance companies purchased from commercial insurers to pay claims in excess of the cap on the medical centers' self-insurance pool, documents show.

The settlement amount is more than all the claims in each of the past five years paid by the two companies, which cover 16 hospitals, 12,000 physicians and 50,000 total employees. The payout comes close to the $200 million cap the commercial insurers agreed to pay for a claim, according to the documents.

When Hopkins and the other institutions formed the insurance company in 1996 in Vermont, where many medical centers have chosen to locate their malpractice insurance companies because of the tax benefits, hospital leadership might have had few domestic options because such coverage was becoming difficult if not impossible to acquire, Provost said.

The Bermuda company was formed years earlier and provided insurance to the members from a country that the insurance industry saw as having fewer regulatory and tax burdens. The offshore company still offers the medical centers most of their basic coverage — the Vermont company is expected to pay about $100,000 of the Levy settlement, while the Bermuda company would pay about $25 million.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/health/bs-hs-hopkins-settlement-20140726,0,153034.story

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