Transitioned to my new position shortly after renewing my malpractice coverage, but its time to renew again so I'm now looking into it more closely.
We have a "captive insurance company" that is a subsidiary of the university with whom we are required to buy coverage out of our cost center (eat-what-you-kill model, at least right now). The rates are pretty good, the coverage is very high for my fairly run-of-the-mill, relatively low-risk psychology practice (3 million/incident; 10 million/aggregate). However, I'm debating also picking up a separate personal policy. I should qualify for an academic one through APA Trust, which is a dramatically lower rate (makes sense given clinical is a smaller portion of my effort). The main reason is that this just seems very sketchy to me. There seems a clear conflict of interest to have a university entity as my malpractice carrier since in the event of a claim, our interests could very well be different. They are also being really vague about the details (i.e. gave me a letter confirming coverage, but are refusing to provide any sort of contract detailing what the coverage includes, policies, etc.). Most psychologists here don't carry separate malpractice (actually haven't found one yet who does).
Just curious if any of you other AMC-based folks have a similar system in place and how you have handled it. It makes perfect sense to me why they would want to cover this themselves - just like with many large employers providing the financial coverage for their own health insurance pools these days, I'm sure it is financially advantageous. Part of me doesn't want to worry about it too much, given the nature of my practice and the fact that claims against psychologists in general are quite rare (I think I saw < 2% lifetime prevalence for even having a malpractice suit brought and that is likely skewed towards those in higher risk areas). I'm nonetheless a bit twitchy about this and considering sinking a few hundred dollars/year into my own policy. If they'd just give me the policy details to review I'd feel a lot better about it, but the fact that they are either withholding it or it doesn't exist has me rather nervous...
We have a "captive insurance company" that is a subsidiary of the university with whom we are required to buy coverage out of our cost center (eat-what-you-kill model, at least right now). The rates are pretty good, the coverage is very high for my fairly run-of-the-mill, relatively low-risk psychology practice (3 million/incident; 10 million/aggregate). However, I'm debating also picking up a separate personal policy. I should qualify for an academic one through APA Trust, which is a dramatically lower rate (makes sense given clinical is a smaller portion of my effort). The main reason is that this just seems very sketchy to me. There seems a clear conflict of interest to have a university entity as my malpractice carrier since in the event of a claim, our interests could very well be different. They are also being really vague about the details (i.e. gave me a letter confirming coverage, but are refusing to provide any sort of contract detailing what the coverage includes, policies, etc.). Most psychologists here don't carry separate malpractice (actually haven't found one yet who does).
Just curious if any of you other AMC-based folks have a similar system in place and how you have handled it. It makes perfect sense to me why they would want to cover this themselves - just like with many large employers providing the financial coverage for their own health insurance pools these days, I'm sure it is financially advantageous. Part of me doesn't want to worry about it too much, given the nature of my practice and the fact that claims against psychologists in general are quite rare (I think I saw < 2% lifetime prevalence for even having a malpractice suit brought and that is likely skewed towards those in higher risk areas). I'm nonetheless a bit twitchy about this and considering sinking a few hundred dollars/year into my own policy. If they'd just give me the policy details to review I'd feel a lot better about it, but the fact that they are either withholding it or it doesn't exist has me rather nervous...
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