"Maternity care is a money loser for most hospitals, and there is no break-even point"

The future continues to look grim for OB as this specialty is dying a quick death:

Losses rise with the number of patients – especially when those patients are poor. The culprits are high expenses for malpractice insurance and relatively low reimbursements from health insurers, the experts said. In recent years, as obstetricians threatened to leave the state because of high premiums, many hospitals took on the extra expense of employing the doctors and paying their insurance bills. . .

. . .The obstetrics program’s losses rose from about $200,000 five years ago to close to $2 million this year, Grass said. Its patient mix also changed as more poor, pregnant patients gravitated to Jeanes. In the last five years, the percentage of maternity patients on Medicaid has grown from about 6 to 35. It has remained unchanged at about 6 percent in other hospital departments, Grass said.

Einstein, where 78 percent of maternity patients are on Medicaid, loses $2,000 per delivery.