These sorts of incidents are terrible and we should do everything to avoid them going forward. But, given their prevalence, it would seem that the medical indus

These sorts of incidents are terrible and we should do everything to avoid them going forward. But, given their prevalence, it would seem that the medical industry hasn't done a particularly good job of dealing with them. The current system, which is more interested in assigning blame and providing restitution, is the free market approach that believes that capital incentives are the only ones needed and seem, to me, to be a failure. If you contrast the way that the medical industry handles incidents with the way that the aviation industry handles incidents, you'll see that pilot incidents are handled through a process that is much more interested in preventing future problems than it is in assigning blame. This leads to less defensiveness and more cooperation in finding processes and equipment that prevent future problems. Also, if you want to make the case that malpractice settlements don't significantly contribute to the cost of health care, it's probably good to cite a source that isn't an association of trial lawyers. Among their failures in logic...arguing that insurance premiums are more tied to market performance than payouts completely disregards the fact that premiums wouldn't be necessary at all without the kind of payouts we currently have. There's an entire insurance industry making billions of dollars per year that is essentially unnecessary overhead that could be eliminated. And the trial lawyers themselves are making significant amounts of money off our broken health care system too. These types of overhead can be eliminated in a single-payer system. Malpractice can be handled by panels of doctors who's sole goals are to push out habitually negligent doctors and reduce the incidence of mistakes for the vast majority who are quality doctors. And, since single-payer covers all future medical costs, there's no need to compensate patients for future costs that result from malpractice. Such a system completely eliminates all the inefficiency of dealing with medical incidents using the judicial system.