In the midst of tort reform debates that consume our news and politics, we often forget to consider its equalizer: patient safety. Tort reform is regularly promoted as the solution to lowering high health care costs in the United States, however, old and new studies show that promoting patient safety may have a bigger effect on lowering health care costs. Most importantly, patient safety actually addresses the patient side of health care rather than de-humanizing the argument to be one of numbers.
Over a decade ago, the Institute of Medicine, a non-partisan entity that advises the government on health matters, released a study finding that preventable medical errors were responsible for as many as 98,000 deaths and more than one million injuries each year. This loss of human life is equivalent to two 737 planes crashing every day, making preventable medical errors the sixth leading cause of death in America.
