A little personal commentary

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Hunterseeker5
Ah, I see, apologies I did misinterpert your argument. In that case I do concur with it to a greater extent. I just have two nitpicks:

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Old Spice
Found that those acidents contribute to but are not the proven cause of the patients death.

The problem with all of this though is that no comparisons are being made, all these stats are available to condem America. But I never see anyone compare them to stats from other countries, I just see America spends a lot of money and gets slightly worse results than the rest of the developed world. No detailed comparisons. Comparisons would either show that hey it is a hell of a lot worse, or just hey Americans waste money which isn't anything new.

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Hunterseeker5
1) I believe "proven" would require a far higher level of certainty than any hospital would allow. I would interpret this sentence from their conclusion as concurring with my argument:
"Yet, the action and progress on patient safety is frustratingly slow; however, one must hope that the present, evidence-based estimate of 400,000+ deaths per year will foster an outcry for overdue changes and increased vigilance in medical care to address the problem of harm to patients who come to a hospital seeking only to be healed."
(ref. [journals.lww.com])

I agree, do you happen to know what their proposals are for reducing harm? I mean besides limiting surgeons to a two martini lunch.

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Hunterseeker5
2) I'm not sure I see the relevance of the detailed comparisons you request. Denmark for example keeps extremely detailed patient records, cradle to grave, and thus is the subject of a LOT of patient studies. They have their own studies on medical errors, not necessarily in English. The point? A political pissing match requires comparison, so I'll ceded the point from that aspect of the argument, but true self improvement doesn't require that you know you're worse or better than someone else its just as simple as "how can we reduce the number?" If you're producing toothpaste, building failure into the production to keep costs much lower makes sense, but an empty tube of toothpaste is very different from leaving forceps in someone's chest. You really don't need a statistic to tell you thats a major screwup.

The relevance of the comparisons is simply to stop the political pissing match that goes on in so many of these discussions. The goal is for people stop worrying about who is number one and start to focus on actually improving condidtions for everyone.

That particular article's recommendations? I could skim it again, but IIRC they were calling for basically more transparency and accountability. There have been all sorts of studies regarding things that can reduce medical errors. Among them are things like cutting out some of the intimidation/hierarchy between doctors/surgeons and their assistants (who are also sometimes MDs), having a pre-operation checklist, having clearer treatment guidelines, re-organizing our education system to various degrees, etc. There has been a huge amount of speculation and discussion regarding little fixes here and there.

Where do I land? Ultimately, unfortunately, policy so often starts with politics. If we want to have a healtcare system which isn't broken, it starts with a productive public dialogue on the subject.

As two prominent examples of the opposite, politically motivated opinions on "Obamacare" from both parties have been simply absurd as they have no compunction about spinning outrageous falsities about it ON BOTH SIDES! The other, which got far less press but sincerely annoyed me, a bunch of surgeons got together to try and stamp out an initiative to provide an OPTIONAL pre-operation checklist for surgeons. What an absurdity. If I were a surgeon, which granted I'm not, I would just have a pre-operation checklist. I mean, if you're about to do something so serious, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize there is far too much to remember so having a basic checklist would be a godsend. If someone else were willing/able to provide a quality checklist for me, that'd be wonderful. Why were so many doctors resisting it and making up BS excuses? I can't say.

But its things like this. I am, regrettably, witness to the front lines of both sides of this debate in the US. Both sides have good points and serious grievances, but it all seems to be lost in the rhetoric.

I typed a response to this about having productive dialogues etc. but it appears it somehow vanished...... Perhaps I clicked away from the page before it finished submitting?

Anyway, lacking the drive to attempt to recreate it, I'll just post this instead:

[www.iflscience.com]

There is a passive moderation feature of the phorum software which flags messages for moderation. It has a odd parsing function, my messages get flagged on a regular basis and what is odd about it is that it doesn't even send out any notice a message was held.

I apologize Cliff, now that you mention it I realize this has happened before and you have patiently explained it to me. Why I can't seem to remember this when it happens is beyond me.

I do maintain its rather inane that it not in some way alert you to the fact that, if nothing else, your post still exists.