Malpractice

This is an issue that fascinates me, but it seems incrediably hard to get any straight answers on what, exactly, is going on with medical malprctice suits. This article offers an intresting solution, even though they freely admit that similar solutions in Europe have not quite worked. However, I am most intrested by this quote:

Only 1 of 8 victims of avoidable medical injury sue, and only 1 of 15—about 7 percent—receive any compensation. And while the threat of suit indeed terrifies doctors, terror doesn't reduce mistakes. Studies have found that doctors in countries where they can't get sued (such as New Zealand) do not err more frequently or egregiously than they do here. The fear of suit actually encourages doctors and hospitals to obscure mundane but serious problems such as poor systems for communicating and confirming drug orders. Finally, the present system subjects caregivers to sudden, unpredictable rises in malpractice premiums, which lately have doubled and even tripled in some states.

They don't even try to address this problem. Does anything work to actually reduce the number of mistakes? Yes, we have to have a system to make sure victims of malpractice are compensated, but I am far more concerned with how you reduce the number of incidents and they seems to imply that you really can't.