Killer Care: How Medical Error Became America's Third Largest Cause of Death, and What Can be Done About It

Each year in the U.S., a quarter of a million deaths are attributable to medical error. If the number shocks, on some level you already knew it was so. Everyone knows someone--perhaps it was yourself--who has suffered miserable treatment in American hospitals, part of the most elaborate, most extensive and expensive health care system in the world. But it is perhaps the most inefficient.
Misdiagnoses, wrong prescriptions, operating on the wrong patient, even operating on the wrong limb (and ...