The news that the NHS spends almost £700 on insurance cover for each birth in England is gobsmacking – especially at a time when barely a week goes by without hearing about economic shortcomings not just in the maternity services, but in the NHS generally. Why on Earth are we spending such a massive amount – £482m annually – on insurance premiums? How many midwives, or dedicated birth centres, or home birth obstetric flying squads, would that sort of money provide? Why are we spending funds that could be used to provide a better service simply to pick up the pieces when things go wrong?

The sad truth is that the answer, or much of it, lies not in healthcare, but in litigation. We live in a blame culture: when something goes wrong, someone has to be blamed. We see it with motor insurance, we see it with house insurance – and we see it in medical insurance. When things go wrong with a tiny baby, with a whole life ahead, the costs of covering for all the care that's likely to be needed if, say, the child has severe cerebral palsy, is vast. Vast payouts mean vast premiums – and therein lies the problem.

So what's the answer? It has to be tackled at its kernel, which is the cost of providing for a lifetime of care for a baby with a severe medical problem. Tragically, some of these babies have been damaged because of shortcomings in their care during labour and birth, but others have been damaged at conception or in the womb. The "damage" is no less heartbreaking or terrible for their parents, but for them there is no one to blame. All these babies will cost a fortune to care for throughout their lives, but for the first group there are funds potentially available, through litigation, while for the second group no such payout exists.

In many cases it's not entirely clear whether a baby's medical condition has been caused or exacerbated by events during labour: with cerebral palsy, for example, the normal physiological responses that protect a foetus during labour may be lacking. So where there's any doubt at all about whether a baby has been damaged as a result of care shortcomings during the birth, parents invariably sue – they're almost forced to, because no other funds exist to give their child optimum care throughout his or her lifetime.

But wouldn't it be better if our society, instead of forcing the parents of severely disabled children to go to court for a payout for negligence, provided a proper fund for all infants in that situation, however the problem was caused? Wouldn't it be better to separate blame (because where a caregiver is to blame, of course, that blame should be apportioned) from the costs of care, which any parents with a seriously ill child are surely entitled to receive?

Given that we now know there's a pot of almost £500m a year, it would be interesting to find out what proportion of that is creamed off by the lawyers and others who service the obstetric litigation industry. It would surely be better to remove them from the equation and set up a fund to provide for the needs of all severely disabled infants. We would almost certainly have enough change to improve the maternity services.

And better maternity services, of course, would mean less chance of things going wrong (where they actually are going wrong). Lawyers and litigation are all well and good where holding somebody to account is justified but, if there's just a life to provide for, let's forget blaming midwives and obstetricians, and start supporting babies and their parents.