Probably the second most helpful change to our system of health care delivery would be a rational approach to medical errors. We have it in the airline industry. Every crash is fully investigated and the cause published. If a defect is found in a plane’s design the fleet is grounded until it’s fixed. If the fault was with the pilot, he is dead.
Why don’t we do that in health care? Well, first, crashes are not so easy to identify. It’s hard to tell a natural death from one due to an error, and hard to tell a normal headache from one that is the side effect of a medicine.
We should work to identify, explain, and correct all errors. But even if we do this perfectly there is still no way to compensate those injured by the errors, automatically. They have to sue. With airlines and medical care both. Whoever is charged with responsibility automatically defends themselves. If they succeed no compensation is available. If not, the legal process consumes much of it, and the injured party may remain inadequately compensated. Or, the injured party may receive a windfall far beyond the size of his loss. The hope of this motivates frivolous suits. The difficulty of the process discourages many who suffer real loss from seeking restitution.
A “no fault” system to automatically compensate all victims of medical errors in an amount reasonably related to their injury would have major benefits. It would end impediments to prompt, full investigation of errors. This would allow timely feedback of results to decrease future errors. The risk of health care would be reduced, as it has been with airline flight, so the cost of compensation would fall. And legal costs resulting from errors would eliminated. Will trial lawyers to vote for that?
