Everything may be bigger in Texas, but New York is the biggest in at least one area: large medical malpractice payments. New York had more than three times as many $1 million–plus malpractice awards as any other state in 2014, according to data from the National Practitioner Data Bank.
New York physicians had 210 malpractice payments of $1 million or more reported to the NPDB last year, compared with 61 for Illinois, the next-highest state. Rounding out the top five were Massachusetts with 49, followed by California with 43 and New Jersey with 41, the NPDB data show.
After taking population into account, New York was still the leader with 10.66 large awards per million residents. Next in this category was the New England trio of Rhode Island, which had 9.42 such payments per 1 million population; Massachusetts (7.26); and Connecticut (6.39).
In 2014, there were four states that had no malpractice payments of at least $1 million reported to the NPDB: Alaska, Kansas, North Dakota, and Nebraska, with Kansas having the largest population. In states with at least one $1 million–plus malpractice payment, Texas physicians had the lowest rate per million population, 0.22 – just 6 awards from a population of 27 million.