What Malpractice Insurance Means in Professional Practice
In this category "malpractice insurance" legally means insurance of professional error, and its legislative foundation is the Law on Medical Activity: a subject of independent medical activity has the right to insure a professional error as a result of which a patient suffered property or non-property damage. This right gives the physician an instrument of financial coverage of risk — and it is precisely this instrument that everyday practice calls "malpractice insurance".
It must be said plainly: Georgia has no separate statute on medical insurance of this kind. The institution of insurance is arranged by general insurance law, while the physician’s special right is defined by precisely this law’s norm. Evaluating an insurance package therefore happens on two axes: what the law gives the physician, and what the insurance market offers for exercising that right.
What This Insurance Covers
The insured object is named in the law itself: a professional error as a result of which a patient suffered property or non-property damage. Property damage consists of defined and documented expenses; non-property damage — of injury to dignity, pain and other dimensions of harm. For the physician this means that the value of the insurance is tied to exactly the risk that lives in everyday practice — damage arising from the relationship with the patient.
It matters equally what this insurance is not: it is not health insurance for the patient and not property insurance for the clinic — it is the financial coverage of the physician’s professional liability. Understanding this distinction is decisive when concluding the contract, because a wrongly chosen product leaves the physician unprotected at the moment of need.
In practical evaluation the physician answers two questions: which kinds of damage are real for the specialty, and how well the conditions of coverage match exactly those kinds. Correct answers fit the contract’s terms to the practice; incorrect ones create a policy that exists on paper but covers the real risk with nothing.