Mr. Encinosa, a coauthor of the AHRQ study, said it’s clear that lower caps positively impact the medical malpractice environment for doctors.
"The high caps just limit the case with very large noneconomic damage verdicts," he said in an interview. "These cases are often only found among a handful of high-risk physicians, and so don’t impact a lot of physicians. The lower caps impact more physicians and thus encourage them to engage in less-defensive medicine. There are litigation savings as well as savings from reduced defensive medicine under lower caps."