They said a careful count of all deaths from preventable medical errors shows between 200,000 and 400,000 people a year die in the U.S. from these mistakes. The only way to get the country to do something about them is to start counting them, Dr. Martin Makary and Michael Daniel of Johns Hopkins University medical school argued.
Cancer and heart disease are neck and neck as the top cause of death in the United States. In 2012, 24 percent of all deaths were from heart disease — 599,711 to be precise. And 582,623 deaths, or 23 percent of the total, were from cancer.
Number three, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or COPD, with 149,000 deaths. Makary's estimate of 250,000 deaths a year would top that.
"We spend a lot of money on cancer and heart disease but we have not even recognized that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States," Makary told NBC News.
"We have not as a country recognized the endemic problem of people dying from the care that they receive rather than the illness or injury for which they seek care."
Health policy experts and many doctors have been trying to call attention to the problem of medical errors for more than a decade. In 1999 the Institute of Medicine released a landmark report estimating that as many as 98,000 people died every year from medical errors.
Since then, other studies have put the number as high as 400,000 a year.
One problem is that errors are not usually put down on death certificates, said Makary, who's been helping lead the movement to disclose and prevent medical mistakes.
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