IRONIES

Life is full of ironies, and I want to point out a significant one that effects everyone, including you. The Centers for Disease Control reports that about 47,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2014, which it rightly describes as an epidemic. You can find the summary here: http://bit.ly/2im7Ftr

The response, of course, is that we need to again declare war on drugs, pass more laws, put more people in jail, and so on. The problem is that we have tried this strategy for decades at an incredible expense to the public and it does not work. But, it is politically popular so I don’t see any real changes in strategy there.

Now for the irony. In 2016 a Johns Hopkins study published in the British Medical Journal reported that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States; heart disease and cancer are first and second. So how many people die each year from medical errors? 250,000. Yes, you read that right. Five times as many people die from medical errors as drug overdoses. Oddly, no one calls this an epidemic.

Here’s a link to the BMJ study: http://bit.ly/2im4MZw

The war on drugs is popular, but where is the war on the medical errors that kill five times as many people and harm thousands of others? It doesn’t exist, even though it costs billions of dollars and ruins lives far and away beyond drugs. Now for the supreme irony.

Instead, war has been declared on the victims of medical errors. That’s right, the politicians who hate government also hate the courthouse, and they are taking away the rights of people who have been harmed by medical errors. Your legislators in Frankfort will soon meet, and one of their top priorities is not to fix a medical system that kills people but instead to protect it by putting drastic limits on your right to seek compensation from the people and the hospitals that make these mistakes.

I’ll be reporting on this some more, so stay tuned.