Panda Bear, MD has posted a nice long entry (“A rambling conversation with a lumbering Asian Bear-Mammal”) that includes a great deal on the medmal situation doctors find themselves in.

Protestations of various oleaginous lawyers and policy experts to the contrary, litigation and more importantly, the threat of litigation has a profound impact on how medicine is practiced in this country and its increasing cost. While the actual cost of payouts in malpractice suits is fairly trivial compared to the huge amount of money changing hands in the medical industry, the behaviors engendered by the threat magnify the cost tremendously. Can I quantify the percentage of care we deliver that is wasted on so-called “defensive medicine” (that is, medical practices designed primarily to protect us from frivolous suits)? Of course not. One man’s defensive medicine is another man’s justifiable dilligence. On the other hand as I have eyes I can see that we spend a great deal of money in the hopeless quest for perfection, perhaps the worst place to spend money as the incremental increase in health this buys us is hardly worth the tremendous cost to achieve it.

Panda Bear, MD writes a lot more about the price of litigation in terms of “defensive medicine” as other issues related to medical malpractice concerns. His post is well worth your time. I think many people, when they think of the cost of unnecessary litigation, only think of what is paid out, not of the costs of trying to avoid such litigation.