How the common practice of "defensive medicine" increases the cost of hospital care and childbirth and automatically makes moms without
maternity insurance pay more and more each day

The MSN Encarta dictionary defines defensive medicine as a noun that means the practice of "extensive diagnosis as protection against lawsuit: medical treatment that involves carrying out extensive diagnostic testing in order to minimize the chances of a patient’s suing the doctor or hospital for negligence."

The Fasthealth.com dictionary defines defensive medicine as "the practice of ordering medical tests, procedures, or consultations of doubtful clinical value in order to protect the prescribing physician from malpractice suits."

An article in Medterms.com says outright that defensive medicine increases the cost of health care. It says defensive medicine is a host of "Medical practices designed to avert the future possibility of malpractice suits. In defensive medicine, responses are undertaken primarily to avoid liability rather than to benefit the patient. Doctors may order tests, procedures, or visits, or avoid high-risk patients or procedures primarily (but not necessarily solely) to reduce their exposure to malpractice liability. Defensive medicine is one of the least desirable effects of the rise in medical litigation. Defensive medicine increases the cost of health care and may expose patients to unnecessary risks."

Malpractice, defensive medicine,
and obstetric behavior

Does the practice of defensive medicine cause the cost of having a having a baby to go up?

In a study done by professors at the Department of Economics, Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, New York, the conclusion is, "The results appear to confirm the existence of defensive medicine in obstetrics." This, of course, raises the cost of obstetric deliveries. These are the summary findings as reported by PubMed, the National Library of Medicine:

OBJECTIVES: The authors examine 58,441 obstetric deliveries in New York State outside New York City to test for the existence of defensive medicine in obstetrics. METHODS: The data consist of merged vital statistics and hospital discharge records from the New York State Department of Health, together with other merged variables. Physician fear of malpractice is proxied by cumulative obstetric malpractice suits by county for 1975 through 1986. A generalized probit analysis is used. RESULTS: Malpractice exposure is shown to influence slightly the use of the electronic fetal monitor (EFM), a major diagnostic tool. Use of the EFM is shown to influence the diagnosis of fetal distress; fear of malpractice influences this diagnosis both directly and through the EFM. The diagnosis of fetal distress significantly affects the choice of cesarean section (c-section) as a method of delivery; hence, fear of malpractice influences the choice of a c-section both directly and through the diagnosis of fetal distress. Failure to include indirect effects via diagnostic procedures and diagnosis would result in an underestimate of the effect of fear of malpractice. Of an overall c-section rate of 27.6% in the data set, fear of malpractice accounts for an estimated 6.6 percentage points, of which 4.4 percentage points reflect a direct effect, and the remaining 2.2 percentage points reflect the effect of malpractice exposure on the use of the EFM and, directly and indirectly, the diagnosis of fetal distress. CONCLUSIONS: The results appear to confirm the existence of defensive medicine in obstetrics. Whether this is a desirable or undesirable effect remains ambiguous, but it is costly.