Medical Errors - Sixth Leading Cause of Death

Yahoo released this article about the grim stastics of medical malpractice. Healthgrades, Inc. studied medical malpractice statistics and found the following:

"Of the total 323,993 deaths among Medicare patients in those years who developed one or more patient-safety incidents, 263,864, or 81 percent, of these deaths were directly attributable to the incidents," it added.

"One in every four Medicare patients who were hospitalized from 2000 to 2002 and experienced a patient-safety incident died."

As scary as those statistics are, how about this:

"If the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's annual list of leading causes of death included medical errors, it would show up as number six, ahead of diabetes, pneumonia, Alzheimer's disease and renal disease," Collier said."

And yet the only medical malpractice laws that are ever proposed are those that limit the rights of malpractice victims. How about some laws to make patients safer?