Doctors With Histories of Big Malpractice Settlements Have Found a New Home in the Insurance Industry

Doctors working for health insurers can rule on 10,000 or more requests for care a year. At least a dozen were hired by major insurance companies after being disciplined by state medical boards or making multiple or outsized malpractice payments.

When Shawn Murphy’s wife died in 2009 after a botched gallbladder surgery, he presumed the doctor who performed the operation would be forced out of medicine for good.

Dr. Pachavit Kasemsap, a former Air Force surgeon, had cut Loretta Murphy’s aorta during that common procedure, according to a database of malpractice payments kept by Florida insurance regulators. She never left the hospital and died just shy of her 40th birthday. Shawn Murphy was left to raise their two daughters, then 13 and 17, on his own.

During the weeks that Murphy prayed for his wife to recover and the months that he fought Kasemsap in circuit court in Brevard County, Florida, he didn’t know that other families had complained that their loved ones had suffered under the same doctor’s care.

Kasemsap has settled five malpractice cases for a total of $3 million, according to the Florida malpractice payment database. That includes $1 million paid to the Murphy family. In one of the cases Kasemsap settled, a patient said the doctor negligently stapled and stitched her rectum to her vagina. Kasemsap denied doing that, and in legal filings in all five cases, the doctor denied that he was negligent.

The doctor’s LinkedIn profile says his last job as a surgeon ended in December 2012, months before he settled the last of those five cases. But there was one industry ready to welcome him regardless: health insurance.