Should people who do locums even if the agencies give malpractice insurance coverage have a separate own policy? Most of these locums agencies have claims-made policies. My concern is that if these locums agencies stop paying their premiums for the claims made policies or if they go bankrupt and don't have the money to pay the tail for physicians then the physicians are screwed or they have to buy an expensive tail policy. This has happened with private equity emergency medicine groups which went bankrupt and the ER docs and APPs had to buy their own malpractice tail or risk having no coverage. I have also worked with some locums CRNAs who say they have "supplemental" malpractice insurance on their own. A lot of these locums agencies won't let people carry their own malpractice insurance and insist that people who work locums with them use the locums agencies' policies which I don't understand why. My thought is that these locums agencies probably buy the cheapest malpractice policies and since the locums physicians are covered under the locums agencies' policies, the locums agencies can throw you under the bus and settle claims without your consent. It's probably to protect the locums agencies and not to protect you that they force you to be under their malpractice policies. Like if a locums CRNA is working "collaborative" with a locums anesthesiologist from the same agency, if the patient had an issue while the locums CRNA was in the OR, if you had your own malpractice insurance, your lawyers could defend/dispute on your behalf but if you have the locums agency's policy, their malpractice policy could say you are the supervising attending and you should have been staffing the CRNA even though the CRNA doesn't want you in the OR. But since you have the locums agency's malpractice policy, their legal people can decide to do whatever and you don't have a say.
So what do you do if the locums agency says that they want you to use their claims-made malpractice policy and won't give you the assignment if you try to buy/use your own malpractice policy?
