Asset Protection for Doctors
Good financial advisors seek to create safe, steady growth and help you avoid losses and exposures to things like market risk and income and estate taxes. A natural extension of that stewardship is making sure that the growth you are fostering, as well as the balance of your assets, are safe from exposure to an increasingly predatory and hostile litigation system. Not only is litigation against doctors more common than ever (as is evidenced by the heated debate on this topic in the context of our national healthcare debate), it’s more dangerous than ever given the multiple attacks on the wealth of the thousands of doctors we serve including:
• Current Economic Conditions • Decreasing Compensation and Insurance Reimbursement Rates • Increasingly Hostile Litigation System that Targets YOUR wealth • Stalled or Negative Investment Momentum • Increasing Overhead and Liability Insurance Costs • Decreases in Liability Insurance Protection due to large awards, consent to settle and defense inside the limits clauses in your current coverage • Increasing Employee Lawsuit exposure; suits against medical employers have tripled in the last ten years! • Increasing burdens of Income and Estate Taxes; the death tax will be 55% of everything over $1MM in 2011 as of the time of publication
Most of our clients have obvious exposures, such as a physician’s potential malpractice exposure or the enduring liability that a large commercial contractor faces. Other sources of exposure are more insidious, such as merely being wealthy and visible, owning income property, or something as simple as you (or your kids) owning and driving a car every day. The numbers are staggering; we are at a point in our litigation system where we have over 70,000 lawsuits filed per day in the United States alone, many without any real merit. Unfortunately being “right” or careful is not enough to keep you safe, nor is relying on your skill and experience.
What we and our clients must take to heart is that litigation attorneys are in business. Just like any business, including yours, they have weekly meetings in which they examine growth, cash flow, revenue goals and new leads or opportunities. This economic motivation is a key and explains in part why we see awards rising and why plaintiffs’ attorneys regularly seek and obtain awards above the limits of applicable liability insurance policies. The average medical malpractice policy, as just one example, is $1MM, whereas the average national malpractice award is about $3.9 million. This leaves the physician “holding the bag” for the other several million dollars. The average doctor simply can’t survive that kind of a loss and maintain their financial goals.