During the last decade, there has been a terrifying proliferation of unwarranted lawsuits.

Some are merely ludicrous.

McDonalds made me fat. Video games caused Columbine.

My favorite: I’m suing myself for violating my own civil liberties. That is an actual case.

Fortunately, most such suits are thrown out by judges on grounds of their absurdity. However, other cases that have grown increasingly common are ones unjustly harmful to the people sued and to society as a whole.

The most injurious of these are medical malpractice suits.

Not only can these cases be emotionally devastating to excellent doctors and cause physician shortages, but they rarely — if ever — do anything to improve patient care or eliminate errors.

When an individual is sued for a mistake, or what a patient thinks was a mistake, the caregiver can face a multitude of legal battles.

In states with laws that do not favor physicians, the cost of malpractice insurance premiums often leads the caregiver to leave the state. This can cause shortages of physicians and nurses in those areas.

Generally, though, patients or the survivors of patients who feel they’ve been wronged go after hospitals in their suits, even if their claims only involve one doctor or nurse.

“Hospitals are the deep pockets,” said one Wichita physician I interviewed, who wished to remain anonymous because malpractice is a sensitive issue for physicians. “Lawyers will throw a wide net trying to catch everyone involved, hoping someone testifies against someone else.”

This illustrates greed, not care for the protection of future patients. If these suits were legitimate, they would go after the caregivers in question and sue for the amount the “mistake” has cost the patient (actually, not emotionally).

In reality, most cases go after hospitals for millions of dollars, the majority of which goes to lawyers instead of the patients. This get-rich scheme makes the lawyers multimillionaires while taking money out of the pockets of every patient through increased care costs.

With the increase of malpractice suits has come the necessary increase in expensive malpractice insurance required from those in need of care. With the threat of one malcontented patient or one greed-in-grief family member toppling a hospital, the institutions have been forced to purchase insurance to protect themselves.

This is a cost that has to be passed on to patients.

These costs prevent the growth of better patient care methods.

“These cases don’t change patient safety,” the physician told me. “We could institute technologies to prevent human error, but they’re incredibly expensive. The money that could be spent there goes to [malpractice] insurance.”

In addition to the financial consequences of malpractice suits, there are less quantifiable but equally concerning consequences in terms of doctors’ time. In the case of a suit against a hospital, a doctor targeted in the case will spend anywhere from eight to 14 hours in out-of-court case time dealing with lawyers, chart review and depositions, plus several days in court, if subpoenaed. This time could be much better spent taking care of patients.

Additionally, the threat of malpractice suits takes a good deal of humanity out of patient care.

Doctors in most states are not allowed any form of apology to patients or families when mistakes are made, or even when the unfortunate outcome of a case was unpreventable. Doctors and nurses are often told to keep quiet for fear of suits, which is highly damaging to caregiver/patient relationship and communication.

All legal action against caregivers should not be banned. There are times when the protection of patients might demand action.

But such cases should be limited to criminal action by caregivers, such as when there is malice and ill-intent by a doctor or nurse or when there is extreme negligence resulting in preventable injury to a patient.

Most suits raised against doctors do not fall into these catagories, though. Even if they did, there are already laws in place to deal with malicious malpractice and recompensate patients.

Because of this, medical malpractice suits should be obsolete, but the money to be made by greedy lawyers and grieving individuals prevents their necessary dissolution.

Though 98 percent of cases rule in favor of the caregiver or caregiving organization, the threat of malpractice suits perpetuates the higher costs of patient care and the loss of qualified doctors and nurses.

The suits that are raised steal the doctors’ time and do grave injury to the relationship between patient and caregiver.

In order to actually improve patient care, malpractice suits should be eliminated from the system.