Timothy Noah writes in Slate:
Have you been inside a hospital lately?
The signs of breakdown are everywhere, from the emergency room overflowing with uninsured people to the film labs unable to locate MRIs that cost thousands of dollars to produce (usually because a doctor misfiled them) to the medical chart whose privacy is guarded so fervently that the patient may need a law degree to get his hands on it, only to discover that results of his last three blood tests never made it out of the fax machine.
(Before she died of liver cancer, my wife found that the only place she could read her medical chart unmolested was the hospital ladies' room.)
The National Academy of Sciences estimates that 3 percent to 4 percent of all people admitted to hospitals end up suffering some sort of injury due to medical error and that the number who die as a result may approach 100,000 annually, which exceeds the number of people who die annually in car crashes.
The problem isn't incompetent doctors or medical technicians; it's the seat-of-the-pants way medical care must be delivered under the current jerry-built system. By comparison, your local Department of Motor Vehicles is a model of efficiency and cheery service.
For Mr Noah's solution, go here.
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