The data in regards to deaths caused by physician are from a seriously flawed study which has no factual basis in objective reality. Therefore, the malpractice lawyers LOVE these figures and broadcast them widely.
In fact, most of what they advocate has no factual basis in reality except their 35-40% take from each verdict.
I am uneasy with comparing gun ownership to medical malpractice, but the post is fundamentally correct about the scale of malpractice.
A path breaking Institute of Medicine study in 1999 using a conservative methodology concluded that "44,000 - 98,000 Americans die from medical errors annually." The Institute of Medicine is part of the National Institutes of Health and is not an arm of the trial lawyers.
http://www.iom.edu/report.asp?id=5575
The actual death toll is likely higher, as indicated by Health Grades, Inc., an independent healthcare quality company. It has reported that "[a]n average of 195,000 people in the U.S. died due to potentially preventable, in-hospital medical errors in each of the years 2000, 2001 and 2002." Again, this is not a study done by trial lawyers.
http://www.healthgrades.com/media/english/pdf/HG_Patient_Safety_Study_Final.pdf
Other medical health professionals have corroborated these findings. To the credit of medicine as a profession, they are beginning to accept that there is a problem and are trying to find ways to reduce errors. Dislike of trial lawyers is a poor reason to differ with medicine's own recognition of its malpractice problem.
"The data in regards to deaths caused by physician are from a seriously flawed study which has no factual basis in objective reality." Sorry, but you're wrong. I've checked into this and there are a number of studies that have numbers much the same. In fact, several studies show significanlty HIGHER numbers. This specific set of statistics come from a newspaper article published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about four years ago.