The only and I mean only value to these polices is they provide you with your own attorney if you go to trial or if you need to appear before your state board. Otherwise, they are useless. They only pay if the primary insurer is exhausted, If you comit malpractice I can't see you causing enough damage to bankrupt even Rite Aid, let alone Walgreens or CVS.
(I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.)
That depends. I think that's generally true in CA. It's not that way in AZ, FL, MN, and the DC tri-state area as the way the practice acts, respondeat superior does not apply to openly negligent behavior. So, if I committed a tortable mistake while I'm high or drunk in DC or AZ, that's not CVS's problem, that's mine as no pharmacy would ever reasonably let an impaired pharmacist work. AZ, I am certain, that there are specific parts of the ARS that are designed to separate respondeat superior implications to your employer in that circumstance. The attorney being provided is actually not just before trial, but can be stopped pre-trial or may settle out of court (which if they say so and pay it, you have to).
Civil service and uniformed personnel, pay attention to the below.
I'll give the fed case as another matter. If I am acting as the agent for the US Government with capital letters, you may not sue me personally under the doctrine of sovereign immunity for official actions and that's codified in FTCA. However, say that I decided that I'm going to hire this pharmacist because she's hot discriminating against you. You decide to sue the USG over my managerial discrimination. Depending on how the local US Attorney wants to deal with it, if he/she is willing to make the effort, the US Attorney can argue that I was not in fact acting as a USG agent, I'm just a horny pervert abusing his office (this is an important distinction as abuse of office is a designated exception under abuse of process). There's 10 or 11 things that for civil service (not uniform) that sovereign immunity can be separated from the respondeat superior and you can be personally sued or criminally held. That list of the "intentional torts" are:
Assault or battery; false imprisonment or false arrest; malicious prosecution or abuse of process; libel or slander; misrepresentation or deceit; and interference with contract rights.
Law enforcement have specific exceptions for those depending on the context of the event, but take it from me, it's easy to get libel or slander and interference with contract rights, or abuse of process easily in the civil service.
So, pharmacists who work at BoP if not uniformed service, almost always carry malpractice due to committing 'assault and battery' in self-defense which still gets an Administrative Investigation Board which you would want a lawyer for. Any pharmacist who works for the National Acquisition Center or handles contracts should carry malpractice (and malfeseance) insurance due to the absolute certainty of being sued personally at least once by a mad supplier. The feds do cover most (and in the case of certain jobs, all) of the costs associated with paying for private malpractice insurance to a predefined limit.
Coming back to confettti's and old timer's point, if you are a conscientious pharmacist who screwed up (even if this involves a patient death) and it was a mistake, and you were consciously trying to work within your corporation's workflow rules: you could be sued, you could lose, and you *possibly* might pay, but the chances of that perfect storm AND having your corporation's fidelity and liability insurance not cover the matter are so remote that PharmMutual can get away with charging you $100 a year as the likelihood of even collecting on it for the consult is extremely low. You still might want to buy malpractice, but for the scenario outlined, it probably is not necessarily a good deal unless you know something about yourself in the moral hazard sense.
Any deviation from that scenario: owner/self-employed/contractor (where the respondeat superior does not apply), soft issues liability, corporation that has a known legal strategy to screw you (Cork Walgreen's legal strategy for old Walgreens), you're impaired and your work doesn't know it, you probably want to think about the circumstances and consider liability. But for the normal rank and file pharmacist doing the normal rank and file work and is observing the normal work process, I doubt you need it.
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Somewhat on a related topic, do any of you carry disability insurance? For that part, the fed covers it, but I'm wondering if anyone personally carries a disability policy for lost income to injury.
