The Driving Force Behind the High Cost of Medical Malpractice Insurance for Obstetricians

Medical malpractice insurance for obstetricians is very expensive. However, you don’t need “too many frivolous lawsuits” to explain why that is so. Common sense will give you the answer. If you don’t do your job when you are delivering a baby the consequences of your carelessness can be catastrophic injuries and the cost to provide for the life time needs of the catastrophically injured new born is enormous. As a result obstetricians will always pay significantly higher premiums for medical malpractice insurance than physicians in the business of treating, for example, acne, so long as doctors are not insured as one large pool but are grouped together by specialty for insurance purposes.

And the cost of the insurance likely will also be pretty healthy because of the compensation the injured newborn and his or her family needs to meet their harms and losses when an obstetrician’s negligence causes injury. A recent study concluded that the core cost of raising a cerebral palsy child is over $900,000. That does not include a ton of costs that anyone who has ever raised a cerebral palsy child knows are also required. On top of that, you have the equally enormous expense providing for the cerebral palsy children when they are adults and their parents are no longer alive or physically capable of being their primary caretakers and providing a home for them, a service by the way that typically is not even included in calculating the economic needs of raising a birth injured cerebral palsy child.

Do ‘frivolous law suits” add anything to the high cost of obstetrical malpractice insurance? The liability insurance industry probably can pull up some examples of “frivolous” medical malpractice cases from their vast data bank of claims. But “frivolous cases” do not regularly win in court. “Frivolous cases” are not being regularly settled by the insurance companies. And “frivolous cases’ are not regularly approved for settlement by the obstetricians who have been sued. The bottom line: no published study on health care costs by any government agency or independent body has ever concluded that ‘frivolous claims” play any real role in the high costs of medical care or medical malpractice insurance.

Is the cost of medical malpractice insurance so high that obstetricians are being forced out of the field and new physicians are being deterred from entering it? Good studies do not exist that answer this question. But if, as some claim, that is happening then the first thing that should be done is determine if this high cost is really justified or if, instead, it represents price gouging by the insurance companies.

Does the amount the insurance companies pay out on obstetrical negligence claims justify the huge premiums they charge obstetricians or are the insurance companies using “litigation crisis” scare tactics to cover their tracks while they rake in an obscene profit?

Who has the data to answer this fundamental question? The medical malpractice insurance industry, of course. Is the medical malpractice insurance industry sharing this data with the public? No. Who should evaluate the data to determine where the truth lies? Congress or a blue ribbon panel committee appointed by Congress and invested with full subpoena power to make sure they get the truth.

Has this been done? Not yet, but it would be a step in the right direction.