How do you figure, even assuming these figures are (still) accurate (many of them are 10-20 years old)? By my reading, "mistakes made by doctors" applies to the "Medical Errors" row in the table at the top of that page. 98,000 deaths per year is horrible, but it's about 0.0319% of Americans. Granted, that's per year; let's assume you have a 0.03% chance of being killed by "Medical Error" every year of your life: with an average lifespan of 80 years, your odds of being killed by "Medical Error" are 1-(.99968^80) = 2.5%.
Now, there are two caveats, other than the (necessarily) very rough nature of the above calculation. First, you may believe that some of the other categories in that row are also things that would be reduced by reducing doctor independence. "Unnecessary procedures" seems like a reasonable candidate for this, though I would assume that since Medical Error is its own category that it tries to be fairly inclusive. Second, you may believe a different number for medical error itself:
"We could have an even higher death rate by using Dr. Lucien Leape's 1997 medical and drug error rate of 3 million. (14) Multiplied by the fatality rate of 14 percent (that Leape used in 1994 (16) we arrive at an annual death rate of 420,000 for drug errors and medical errors combined. If we put this number in place of Lazorou's 106,000 drug errors and the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) 98,000 medical errors, we could add another 216,000 deaths making a total of 999,936 deaths annually."
Side note: Is it just me, or does the author sound hopeful that we might be able to add to the death toll?
If you believe that 420,000 number (about 4x higher than what's in the table), that'd be about 10%.
Did you get "1 in 3" by attributing all iatrogenic deaths to doctor error?
"Did you get '1 in 3' by attributing all iatrogenic deaths to doctor error?"
Yes, because despite the fact that there is a category called medical errors, almost all of the other deaths listed are medical errors as well. It's not like there is really any legitimate reason for more than a trivial amount of people to get MRSA in a hospital seeing as when best practices are followed the rate of line infections goes from 4% to 0%.
"How do you figure, even assuming these figures are (still) accurate (many of them are 10-20 years old)?"
The NY Times just published an article a week ago saying the rate of medical errors hasn't gotten any better, which I linked to below.
Patients getting infected because somebody didn't wash their hands is an abomination, we can agree on that.
This thread was originally about decision-making power being shifted from doctors (M.D.s) to insurance companies, administrators, regulators, laywers, and even patients themselves. Your first comment suggested that this is a good thing because those same M.D.s kill 1/3 of all Americans (and as a corollary, the other parties involved plus the other healthcare providers that outnumber M.D.s many-to-one kill nobody).
I think it's pretty suspect that the linked page cherry-picks its numbers, rather than trying to assemble them all from a single source which has taken some care not to double-count. Granted, such a source may not exist, but essentially the death toll for each cause X is taken from a paper which is trying to make a big deal out of X.
The fact that those numbers sound fishy is orthogonal to the fact that I don't think they would be any better if the power to make treatment decisions is taken from those best equipped to make it.
And all of that is orthogonal to the fact that the linked page does not even attempt to show this, so it doesn't really seem to support the point you were making with that citation.
Now, there are two caveats, other than the (necessarily) very rough nature of the above calculation. First, you may believe that some of the other categories in that row are also things that would be reduced by reducing doctor independence. "Unnecessary procedures" seems like a reasonable candidate for this, though I would assume that since Medical Error is its own category that it tries to be fairly inclusive. Second, you may believe a different number for medical error itself:
"We could have an even higher death rate by using Dr. Lucien Leape's 1997 medical and drug error rate of 3 million. (14) Multiplied by the fatality rate of 14 percent (that Leape used in 1994 (16) we arrive at an annual death rate of 420,000 for drug errors and medical errors combined. If we put this number in place of Lazorou's 106,000 drug errors and the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) 98,000 medical errors, we could add another 216,000 deaths making a total of 999,936 deaths annually."
Side note: Is it just me, or does the author sound hopeful that we might be able to add to the death toll?
If you believe that 420,000 number (about 4x higher than what's in the table), that'd be about 10%.
Did you get "1 in 3" by attributing all iatrogenic deaths to doctor error?