Protect Access to Quality Physicians: Oppose Raising the MedMal Cap!
Help preserve access to quality healthcare in Virginia!
The Impact on Physicians and Insurance if the Cap is Raised by the Virginia General Assembly
Existential Financial Threat:
Enactment would have a truly significant impact on healthcare providers’ ability to obtain and afford insurance.
Combined with already-falling reimbursement rates, these additional costs will directly threaten physicians’ ability to sustain their practices and care for patients.
Extreme Virginia Policy Limits:
VA insurance policy limits ($2.75M) are already significantly higher than a typical medical liability policy ($1M per claim / $3M annual aggregate). Fewer than 3% of MPL policies exceed $2M — demonstrating the current Virginia situation is already highly unusual.
Market Can’t Support $6M+ Policies:
It is unclear that the industry would have the risk appetite to write such policies, and if carriers did, the premiums would be prohibitively expensive. Reinsurance for individual physicians is non-existent (reinsurance is for insurance companies), and excess policies are effectively unavailable to individual physicians.
Unrealistic Workarounds:
The suggestion that individual physicians carry lower limits while practices cover higher limits is not feasible — each doctor would need an unencumbered full-cap limit. Additionally, the asset protections in the bill apply only to “individual physicians”; a practice is not a person.
The video is a snipped of the House floor debate on SB 536 on March 10, 2026.The Medical Society of Northern Virginia (MSNVA) is fervently opposed to SB 536.
MSNVA is a separate, independent organization that represents and protects the interests of community physicians.
MSNVA will continue to advocate against raising the MedMal cap in Virginia. In preparation for the 2027 General Assembly, MSNVA is collaborating with other local medical societies from across the Commonwealth. Please continue to add your name to this letter.
At a moment when rising costs, federal funding uncertainty, and workforce shortages are already straining our healthcare system, raising the MedMal cap would impose new financial burdens on physicains that will ultimately reduce — not improve — access to care for the Virginians you represent.
A Dramatic and Unjustified Increase in Liability Exposure
Raising the current medical malpractice damages cap, raising it from $2.7 million to over $6 million — with automatic annual inflation adjustments adding hundreds of thousands of dollars more each year.
These changes do not simply shift numbers on paper. They translate directly into higher malpractice insurance premiums, reduced coverage availability in certain specialties, and — for providers who cannot absorb those costs — the painful decision to relocate, retire early, or limit the patients and procedures they accept. Virginia’s rural and underserved communities, already facing provider shortages, would be hit hardest.
The Promised Asset Protections Are Illusory
Proponents of SB 536 point to personal asset protection provisions as a safeguard for physicians. In practice, these protections offer little comfort. A provider qualifies for protection only by carrying malpractice coverage at the full $6 million — and rising — cap level. For many practitioners, particularly in high-risk specialties or smaller practices, such coverage is either unavailable in the market or prohibitively expensive. Most physicians carry one million in limits across the country. Moreover, the statutory language governing these protections is so poorly drafted as to render them unenforceable in meaningful circumstances. The protection is a promise that cannot be kept.
The Wrong Legislation at the Wrong Time
Virginia’s healthcare clinicians are already navigating one of the most difficult operating environments in recent memory. Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement rates have not kept pace with inflation. Federal funding instability threatens safety-net clinics and community health centers. Patients who rely on physicians willing to accept government-insured patients, work in underserved areas, or practice in high-risk specialties may no longer have the necessary access.
Advancing SB 536 in this environment is not a reform — it is an accelerant. The increased liability exposure, litigation risk, and insurance costs it creates will push more providers toward the exits at precisely the moment Virginia’s communities need them most. Affordability and access are already among the most pressing healthcare issues facing your constituents. SB 536 worsens both.
Physicians entered medicine to serve patients and to do no harm. We ask that elected officials, members of the General Assembly apply that same principle to any legislation that attempts to raise the MedMel cap. Protect physicians, access to care, and Virginia patients!