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Due to a high-profile legislative debate over recent reforms to New Mexico鈥檚 medical malpractice laws, many New Mexicans have begun to connect the dots between a powerful plaintiffs鈥� bar that profits from lawsuits and the growing difficulty patients face in accessing care. A recent Legislative Finance Committee survey confirmed what providers have been saying for years: Doctors are leaving New Mexico because of the high risk of being sued and the outsized cost of liability insurance.

Rather than acknowledging this reality, we are now seeing repeated attempts to shift blame away from the plaintiff attorneys to anywhere else.

Last week鈥檚 column by plaintiff-attorney Cherie LaCour is the latest example. She argues that there is no 鈥渓itigation crisis鈥� in New Mexico. But she misinterprets statistics, relies on national data that does not apply here and omits critical context.

LaCour claims that nationally, malpractice claims are declining while insurance premiums are rising, and therefore insurance companies are responsible for New Mexico鈥檚 access to care crisis. She misstates the evidence. She writes that the American Medical Association reported malpractice insurance rates 鈥渕ore than tripled nationally.鈥�

The article actually says that from 2016 to 2024, the number of premiums that increased year over year rose from 15.4% to 49.8%. That simply means more policies saw increases, which is hardly surprising in an inflationary period. It does not mean the premium rates tripled.

The larger problem is that LaCour relies exclusively on national trends while ignoring New Mexico鈥檚 outlier status. New Mexico is not behaving like the rest of the country. We have, by far, the highest number of malpractice payouts per capita in the nation. According to the National Practitioner Data Bank, New Mexico鈥檚 per capita malpractice payouts were nearly triple the national average. Per capita numbers matter because a payout that can be absorbed in a state of 10 million people becomes destabilizing in a state of just over 2 million. When a large verdict hits here, the cost is spread across far fewer people and the financial shock is magnified in a way national averages cannot capture.

Our malpractice system is so far out of line with the rest of the nation that even the statistics LaCour cites reveal the underlying problem once you reconcile them. She notes that New Mexico ranks 15th in total malpractice compensation paid to plaintiffs, but only 25th in average compensation per case. Those two claims cannot both be true without acknowledging what they imply. New Mexico is the 37th most populous state. If our average payout per case is middle of the pack, yet our total payouts are among the highest in the nation, the math leaves only one conclusion: We have far more malpractice lawsuits being filed here than in most states. Total payouts can only be high in two ways, either each case pays unusually large amounts, or there are an unusually large number of cases. LaCour鈥檚 own statistics show that our payouts per case are not unusually large. That means the volume of lawsuits must be. And in a rural state with limited providers, that volume strains the system.

Insurance loss ratios makes the picture even clearer. The loss ratio measures how much insurers pay out in claims compared to how much they collect in premiums. A loss ratio of 100% means insurers pay out exactly what they take in. Anything above 100% means they are paying out more than they collect. New Mexico鈥檚 five-year average malpractice loss ratio is 175%, meaning insurers have been paying out 75% more than they take in. Recently, the loss ratio exceeded 200%, roughly three times the national average. That is not a picture of excessive profits. It is a picture of a market in crisis. When insurers consistently pay out more than they collect, they raise premiums, restrict coverage or leave the state entirely. All three have happened here.

When facilities face sudden premium spikes or cannot absorb the cost of a verdict, they close. That leaves entire regions without local care, forcing New Mexicans to take unpaid time off work, drive hours for basic appointments and shoulder travel costs many families cannot afford.

New Mexico鈥檚 liability premiums have also risen far faster than the nation鈥檚. According to the Medical Liability Monitor, premiums for internal medicine increased 19.6% nationally from 2016 to 2024, but 44% in New Mexico. The pattern is consistent across specialties. So, unless insurers are somehow less greedy in every other state, there must be another explanation for why New Mexico is so far out of line.

And plaintiff attorneys would not like the answer.