Accepting no deliveries: Obstetricians are hard to find in the Mississippi Delta

When medical liability insurance drives physicians out of rural Mississippi, pregnant women are left feeling the pain.

By Tanya Albert, AMNews staff. Sept. 9, 2002.

Cleveland, Miss. -- It's 10 a.m. on a Monday and the magazines in the office shared by obstetrician-gynecologists Mark Blackwood, MD, and Bradley Baugh, MD, are still neatly fanned out on waiting room tables.

The cushioned chairs sit empty.

No one stands in the hallway waiting to call patients in, The five examining rooms are vacant.

A steady stream of patients -- some visibly pregnant, others barely showing -- does come out of the sweltering 90-plus heat and into the air-conditioned office.

But they don't stay long. And they don't see their doctors.

Instead, they grab a copy of their medical records or drop off instructions for where they should be sent.

A letter posted to the large wooden front doors leading into Delta Ob/Gyn explains it all: "It is with much regret that we must inform you that our office will be closed effective 7/14/02 until further notice. Due to the current malpractice crisis in the state of Mississippi, our liability insurance has been canceled."

"I feel real bad for my patients because they need me," said Dr. Blackwood, days after he and his partner had to stop seeing patients. "Their access to care has been compromised."

The scene has been repeated in OB waiting rooms across the state.

In the past year, more than half of physicians who deliver babies in an area of the Mississippi Delta that spans from Clarksdale in the north to Greenville in the southwest and Greenwood in the southeast have had to quit. Cleveland falls in the center of that triangle, roughly 45 miles from its surrounding cities. [...]