You mean the health care sector has gotten so good at fixing all the other causes of death that what we see is the 'noise in the system'? I think not. You can

You mean the health care sector has gotten so good at fixing all the other causes of death that what we see is the 'noise in the system'? I think not. You cannot legislate good care on the backs of physicians. Or physicians will go on strike just as they did in the UK last week. In 3 days, 40,000 surgeries were cancelled. 80,000 office visits cancelled. But the PR people were quick to get on the tube and with their constipated smiles reassure the public that there were no problems. How many of those people died? We'll never know. In the US, as long as insurance executives cut physician payment in favor of hospital bureaucracies and executive compensation, HMOs pile on the regulations to reduce utilization, physicians are slammed left and right to guess what's right instead of doing the necessary tests- there will be progressively LESS quality care. Checklists do slow down care delivery AND they are insufficient. Errors snowball because a sick patient is like a set of dominoes ready to topple. Just because the surgical site was properly marked and the type of operation was verified, does not mean that the patient will not fall off the stretcher when 5 people have to struggle to move an inanimate pile of flesh from the operating table to the gurney. The more people involved in a given endeavor, then the likelihood of error increases. We need to strive to simplify care, not complexify it. We have already shipped many of our manufacturing jobs overseas. At this rate, much of our medical care will go the same way. The upper echelons of the the insurance companies and the HMOs will enjoy their views of the New York skyline while they figure out how to outsource health care to Cuba. We also need transparency on costs. Once we get the REAL data, improvements will inevitably follow. We also need REAL data sharing. There are 453 electronic medical record systems now in the US and they don't talk to each other. 453 versions of 'microsoft-like behavior' obscuring the flow of information. It's too funny to think of HIPAA in an era when the NSA already knows everything. And people are always blabbing about their health problems anyway. Just stand in line at Panera, Starbuck's.