If you believe that runaway lawsuit abuse in the United States does not affect the average citizen, take a moment to read about what’s happening in Brooklyn. A hospital has decided to shut down their OB department and stop delivering babies. Why? Just ask yourself. If you ran a hospital, how long could you continue to operate when you had to pay $8.8 million per year just to buy malpractice insurance to protect yourself from unscrupulous lawsuits? Actually, the $8.8 million is the malpractice insurance for OB alone and just a part of the total $22 million in annual medical malpractice costs. In this zero sum situation, doctors and hospitals lose money, while patients with bad outcomes and their lawyers gain money. The average patient is the big loser through higher costs passed down from the health care providers and more importantly, through lack of access to medical care, as in this case.

Lawyer will throw out the argument that it’s not their greed that is the root of the problem. Rather, they argue that it is actual medical malpractice that is the culprit. Well, then if that’s truly the case, then they should be happy each time a hospital closes or a doctor quits practicing, because it must be that only the bad hospitals and the bad doctors are affected. Somehow, I don’t think so.