When Shayanna Alford began labor in Cuthbert and called 911, the closest ambulance was 45 miles away, according to a reporting from Capital B, a news source covering Georgia’s black community. It then took the ambulance 30 minutes to find her before she and her coming baby began the 45-mile ride to Albany because the local hospital had closed.

Similar stories abound as 13 Georgia hospitals, mainly in rural areas, have closed since 2013. 

Today, 66% of Georgia counties lack a hospital with an obstetrics department or a birthing center, and 43% of counties lack professional obstetric care. This plays a major role in Georgia’s high rate of maternal mortality.

Obstetricians are the most frequently sued group of physicians in Georgia, and many opt to forego obstetrics practice because of the high cost of malpractice insurance driven by lawsuits and our unfavorable legal environment. At the same time, hospitals are seeing increases up to 115% in a year for liability insurance.

More than 40 hospital labor and delivery departments have been forced to close in recent years, largely due to economic factors that include insurance costs and inability to hire enough medical professionals because of malpractice insurance costs.

In addition to increased premiums, many hospitals see increased self-insurance requirements – money they must pay in a lawsuit before insurance starts to cover it, akin to a personal insurance deductible. At Gov. Brian Kemp’s Roundtable on Excess Litigation in Healthcare, a hospital CEO said its self-insurance requirement recently tripled from $5 million per lawsuit to $15 million per lawsuit.

Increased costs destabilize hospital finances, threaten the hospital’s ability to stay open and force reductions in community outreach programs. The hospitals represented by my organization, the Alliance of Community Hospitals, are nonprofits. Our “profits” don’t go to shareholders but instead are reinvested in serving our communities. These programs include free childbirth education, mobile mammograms and maternal health programs.

The increasing costs of liability insurance and related costs threaten the availability of these meaningful services.

Civil litigation reform, as proposed by Kemp and supported by legislative leaders like Speaker Jon Burns and Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, will help increase the number of obstetrics practitioners treating patients and help Georgia’s rural hospitals survive. 

Senate Bills 68 and 69, introduced by Sen. John F. Kennedy (R-Macon), will restore justice to our legal system and help ensure the continuing availability of lifesaving emergency care, including emergency maternal and neonatal care. It would also allow community hospitals to continue investing in outreach for the health of their patients, and end the “lawsuit casino” in which hedge funds, other private investors or even foreign adversaries like China promote lawsuits seeking profit without regard to the plaintiff’s health or that of their community.

Georgia’s healthcare system is caught between two rocks – lawsuits and liability insurance costs on one side and pressure from government and insurance companies on the other. For the stability of Georgia’s healthcare delivery system and the lives of the patients we serve, we must bring the skyrocketing costs of jury verdicts and insurance settlements back down to earth.

Shayanna Alford successfully delivered her baby despite the distance she had to travel, but the birth came prematurely and the baby suffered from jaundice, Capital B reported. Because she lives in a maternity care desert, the baby’s regular ongoing care required trips to a doctor 30 minutes away across state lines.

Many others in Georgia have experienced tragedy because they didn’t have access to the care they needed.

We can increase the number of Ob-Gyns in Georgia, but not if our out-of-whack legal system disincentivizes doctors from practicing that specialty. Restoring balance preserves access to the courts for those who’ve been hurt by negligence, but it protects doctors who acted responsibly from having to settle cases that are too expensive – or too risky – to fight.