South Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) opened enrolment on June 25 for its 2026 essential medical high-payout liability insurance support program, absorbing the full cost of malpractice insurance premiums for physicians in obstetrics, paediatrics, and emergency medicine. The government has stepped into a liability risk that the commercial non-life insurance market does not appear to offer at any price, in specialties where physician attrition, litigation frequency, and declining insured pools have made the risk structurally unattractive to private carriers.
Medical professional liability insurance is not a compulsory line in South Korea. Compulsory insurance under South Korean law covers health insurance, employment insurance, industrial accident compensation insurance, and long-term care insurance, according to the ICLG Insurance & Reinsurance Laws and Regulations Report 2025-2026 Korea. Medical professional liability coverage for practitioners in domestic hospitals is voluntary.
South Korea’s non-life insurance market is dominated by five carriers: Meritz Fire & Marine Insurance, Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance, Hyundai Marine & Fire Insurance, DB Insurance, and KB Insurance, according to the Korea Insurance Research Institute’s Q3 2024 industry trend report. All five offer commercial liability products. Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance and Hyundai Marine & Fire Insurance both include liability insurance within their product portfolios.
Neither the FSS product registry nor the Korea Insurance Research Institute’s published market data records medical professional liability as a standalone premium category within general insurance, and none of the five dominant carriers has publicly disclosed a product line targeting the high-risk obstetric or emergency medicine segments covered by the government program. The absence of such disclosures, across five carriers and two regulatory data sources, is the strongest available evidence that commercial coverage for these specialties does not exist at material scale. The Ministry’s forthcoming revisions to the Medical Dispute Mediation Act are the regulatory trigger most likely to force commercial carriers to reassess their product positioning in this space.
The program is instead administered jointly by the Korea Medical Dispute Mediation and Arbitration Agency (K-MEDI) – a public institution established under the Ministry of Health and Welfare pursuant to the Act on Remedies for Injuries from Medical Malpractice and Mediation of Medical Disputes – and the Korean Medical Association Medical Compensation Mutual Aid Association, a physician-run indemnity body. Risk is pooled within a mutual framework, with the state covering premiums entirely rather than transferring exposure to the commercial non-life market, according to DongA Science.
The program follows years of attrition in high-risk specialties where litigation exposure has made physician recruitment and retention difficult. According to Ministry of Health and Welfare data cited by the Korean College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (KCOG) – a professional association that has formally petitioned the government for legislative reform on litigation risk, and whose figures draw on official Ministry statistics – the number of delivery facilities fell 34.4% over the past decade, from 706 in 2013 to 463 in 2023, with further decline estimated to between 425 and 445 facilities in 2024. In the second half of 2025, only 299 out of 620 obstetrics and gynaecology residency positions – 48.2% – were filled, according to Korea Biomedical Review.
Data submitted to Rep. Kim Mi-ae by the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA) cited by Korea Herald showed that nearly 89% of obstetrics and gynaecology clinics nationwide filed no insurance claims related to childbirth between January and August 2025. According to the OECD’s Health at a Glance 2025 report, South Korea has 2.7 practising doctors per 1,000 population, against an OECD average of 3.9, and the shortage is concentrated in the specialties the program covers.
Litigation frequency compounds the supply problem. Medical dispute mediation cases involving childbirth rose from 23 in 2022 to 35 in 2024, with additional cases proceeding directly to court, according to Korea Herald. The KCOG attributed the caesarean delivery rate of 67.4% in 2024 in part to defensive medicine driven by legal risk, according to Korea Biomedical Review.
The program sets the overall specialist coverage ceiling at 1.8 billion won per incident. The insurance layer covers amounts between 150 million won and 1.65 billion won, with the annual specialist premium of 1.75 million won paid entirely by the state. Resident coverage reaches 330 million won, with training hospitals absorbing the first 20 million won and the government funding residual premiums of 300,000 won per person annually, according to Chosun Biz.
A premium of 1.75 million won against coverage of up to 1.65 billion won is a ratio no commercial carrier would sustain without subsidy at the litigation frequencies documented above. Non-life insurers in South Korea reported net income of 5.8 trillion won in the first half of 2024, an increase of 627.7 billion won, or 12.2%, year on year, driven by increased insurance product sales and a reduction in the liability for incurred claims, according to FSS data reported by Korean Re.
Health Minister Jung Eun-kyeong stated: “This program allows medical institutions to prepare for medical accidents without an extra expense burden. We expect it to serve as a safety net that benefits both medical professionals and patients. We will further solidify the medical accident compensation system by revising subordinate regulations under the Medical Dispute Mediation Act and improving the insurance system.”
The 2026 program extends coverage beyond the earlier focus on obstetricians with delivery records and select paediatric surgeons to include specialists at maternal and neonatal care centres, physicians in paediatric thoracic surgery, paediatric cardiology, and paediatric neurosurgery, and specialists at emergency institutions enrolled in a government pilot project covering regional emergency centres, regional trauma centres, and specialized paediatric emergency centres. Eight residency tracks remain covered: internal medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, paediatrics, thoracic and cardiovascular surgery, emergency medicine, neurosurgery, and neurology. Physicians in the emergency transport pilot who enrol by end of July receive coverage backdated to March 2026.
