#3 cause of death in the U.S.: Medical Error
Many of us know or have heard that medical error/malpractice has been estimated in recent years to kill "at least" 200,000 Americans annually, in-hospital. People who would not have died when they did if they'd not been receiving treatment in an American hospital at the time they died.
The U.S. government has never kept statistics or even tried to estimate the death toll directly attributable to our ridiculously lousy medical care system, mostly because it flat doesn't care to know what that toll may be. Fortunately, a study released earlier this month by patient safety experts at Johns Hopkins University has analyzed data over an eight-year period and come up with an estimate published in the May 3rd issue of BMJ.
Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States
The Johns Hopkins estimate of 250,000 deaths per year establishes medical errors/malpractice as the #3 cause of death, ahead of CDC's listed #3 cause - respiratory disease - by a good 100,000. Heart disease and cancer still come in #s 1 and 2, but that may soon change if criteria for classification is updated as the researchers are advocating. Currently CDC does not have a classification for medical error on death certificates, so no matter how directly responsible our lousy health care system may be for any given patient's death, the official cause of death is listed as whatever underlying medical issue they were being treated for at the time of death. If CDC does update the classification protocol, the annual death toll could go considerably higher.
"Incidence rates for deaths directly attributable to medical care gone awry haven't been recognized in any standardized method for collecting national statistics," says Martin Makary, M.D., M.P.H., professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an authority on health reform. "The medical coding system was designed to maximize billing for physician services, not to collect national health statistics, as it is currently being used.”
The 251,454 now-documented deaths by medical error/malpractice are still restricted solely to those deaths that occur in-hospital. So far, nobody's trying to keep track of how many people die of the same cause outside of hospitals.
The researchers noted that most medical errors represent systemic problems. These include:
• poorly coordinated care
• fragmented insurance networks
• absence/underuse of safety nets and other protocols
• unwarranted variation in physician practice patterns
• lack of accountability
This preliminary 250,000+ figure from Johns Hopkins drowns the estimated ~40,000 Americans who die annually due to the lack of access to medical care (the uninsured), a figure that was tossed around quite liberally during President Obama's struggle to get the health insurance reform known as "Obamacare" [ACA] through the Congress when he took office.
Obviously health insurance reform is not the same thing as actual health care, though a significant portion of the public seems to believe it is. Since ACA tens of millions of Americans have gained access to the health care delivery system, and the number of deaths attributable to being uninsured has [hopefully] gone down because of it. Yet now we know that access to the health care delivery system kills many times more people than not having access does, and that this is wholly attributable to the fact that our health care delivery system rates somewhere south of Latvia in the outcomes department. That is a statistic that deserves everyone's attention.
Our system is still badly broken despite the insurer bailout known as ACA. Can we expect the next POTUS to recognize and address this horrible situation as if it were the official #3 (or higher, the counting's just started) cause of death in this nation?