Single Payor No Panacea

The physician-activist advocated passionately for a single-payor system, citing the discomfiting reality of Americans dying for lack of medical care. But she neglected to mention that many more Americans die because of their medical care. Credible studies report 225,000 preventable iatrogenic deaths (deaths directly attributable to treatment) annually from misdiagnoses, unnecessary surgeries, hospital-acquired infections, medication errors, adverse drug reactions, et al--making medical care the third-ranking cause of death in the United States, ahead of highway accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS. I, too, espouse the single-payor concept, but unless the scourge of Iatrogenic Disease is aggressively addressed, no amount of "reform" is going to cure what ails us.