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In 2002 a group of highly experienced medical malpractice insurance professionals gathered together to explore how to deal with the national medical malpractice insurance crisis that existed at the time. The American Medical Association had categorized nineteen states as crisis states where doctors either couldn’t readily find medical malpractice insurance or the price had escalated to an unreasonable level. This was the third hard market portion of the medical malpractice insurance cycles since the first real crisis in the mid to late 1970’s. 

Members of this group of managers had started and managed medical malpractice insurance companies during each of the last two hard markets and understood what needed to be done to assist the doctors struggling to find insurance. In addition, in spring of 2002 Conning & Company had published a study exploring why over an extended periods of time some medical malpractice insurance companies had been successful and others had failed. They found that the successful companies had three common factors. They were single state companies, they wrote only medical malpractice insurance for physicians and they were owned by the doctors they insured. Most of the group of managers had been in the industry for at least twenty-five years each and their experience had shown them that those three factors were the best aspects for a successful company.

The group began the process of forming physician medical malpractice insurance companies. There were several other critical decision points that needed to be reached. First, it was decided to make the company a locally domiciled licensed insurance company regulated by the state’s insurance department. This typically requires a minimum capital infusion of $5 million dollars to acquire a license. That would also qualify the company to be part of the state’s Guarantee Fund. Second, structure was important. They could have formed a Risk Retention Group and been licensed in all fifty states with capital of less than one million dollars. Instead they chose to do it the right way and form a reciprocal insurance company and license it in the respective state with capital of $5 million dollars. Then a group of local physicians were recruited to serve as the governance structure of the company.

The highly experienced professionals each had approximately twenty five years of experience in their respective field, including the critical insurance company functions of Finance, Operations, Underwriting, Claims, Sales and Risk Management. They utilized their experience to acquire the license and Healthcare Underwriters Group was born.
Today Healthcare Underwriters Group is successful and daily aggressively defends its insured doctors. The company is managed conservatively and is financially strong. It has stabilized premiums and provides its insured doctors a strong risk management program to help prevent claims. It is governed by a Board of local doctors that are all insureds and have become insurance professionals in their own right.

Healthcare Underwriters Group is positioned extremely well for the future and looks forward to protecting its insured physicians through all aspects of the next insurance cycle.