What happened: A Pennsylvania bill would expand the Mcare Act’s blanket “interest” rule into three distinct categories for periodic med-mal payments
Who’s involved: Pennsylvania House legislators; medical professional liability insurers and defense counsel
What’s at stake: Whether prejudgment interest, postjudgment interest and delay damages each accrue separately on periodic payments
Why it matters: The current one-word rule leaves open which types of interest it actually covers
Where it stands: Introduced October 6, 2026; referred to House Judiciary Committee
For over two decades, one word has done the heavy lifting in a key section of Pennsylvania’s medical malpractice law. That word is “interest.”
House Bill 2842, introduced on October 6 by Representatives E. Nelson, Rowe, Verobish and Wallen, would swap it out for three. The bill would amend Section 509(b)(4) of the Medical Care Availability and Reduction of Error Act - the Mcare Act - replacing the blanket term “interest” with “prejudgment interest, postjudgment interest and delay damages.”
The section governs periodic payments of future damages in med-mal cases. Under the current language, interest does not accrue on a periodic payment before it comes due. The bill would make explicit that the same rule applies separately to prejudgment interest, postjudgment interest and delay damages.
That distinction matters. The existing statute leaves open whether “interest” covers all three categories or only some. When a large med-mal verdict is structured as periodic payments, the answer determines how much the final payout grows between verdict and payment date.
Nothing else in the section would change. If a payment is late, the legal rate of interest still kicks in from the due date.
HB 2842 was referred to the House Judiciary Committee on October 7. It has not had a hearing and has not advanced beyond committee.
If enacted, the amendment would take effect 60 days after signing.
Med-mal insurers pricing periodic-payment exposure in Pennsylvania will want to track whether this bill moves - the difference between one interest category and three is the kind of detail that reshapes reserve calculations.
The bill has been introduced and referred to committee. It has not been enacted, and its provisions are not yet law.
