Dr Ira Richterman, CEO of Ohio-based OMNI Orthopaedics president of Cayman-domiciled medical malpractice captive StarKap, has told Captive Intelligence that he and the other physicians within the captive had limited choice but to turn to captives in order to continue working as physicians.
“The goal for us in the captive industry was to be able to manage our risk and control our expenses, in order for us to continue to provide healthcare,” he said.
“We’ve been doing it a long time, as a small group of physicians, we are self-motivated in our arena, and that’s why we put this together.
“We only insure ourselves, from the point of view that we believe that we want all the physicians to be the owners too, so we want them all to be part of the game.”
Richterman noted that there is a split in opinion between those who believe the captive needs reinsurance and those that do not.
“Half of us don’t believe we need reinsurance, while half of us like the little bit of security that we have,” he added.
As a compromise, Richterman said that StarKap takes half of its own reinsurance risk.
“So, we ourselves are underwriting our own reinsurance to compromise between the splits in our group of those who want it and those who don’t.”
At this point, Richterman noted that the captive is vertically oriented and purely homogeneous malpractice insurance.
However, he highlighted that some members have merged in recent times and as a result, the captive is now at a size where it is considering bringing its own healthcare insurance into some form of self-insured model.
“We understand it, we get it, and we’re large enough now that we’re going to start to explore diversity within our captive by having other risks,” he said.
He also pointed out, that in the future, the captive members may look to write additional lines such as cyber through the captive. “It’s not within the captive yet because we don’t have a strong enough grasp to take that risk ourselves, but maybe in time when there’s more knowledge and experience in that industry,” Dr Richterman added.