This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 4, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Medical Malpractice System doesn't serve patients very well.

A new Cato Institute book attempts to understand why medical malpractice litigation, how it works, why tort reform hasn't helped, is available now.

Charlie Silver is one of the co-authors we spoke last week.

There is a surprisingly large amount of medical malpractice.

Nobody knows exactly how much malpractice there is because a very large fraction of it goes unreported.

So anyone who says they can estimate it with precision is conveying false information.

But we know that there are people who are systematically at risk of being injured, for example,

secondary infections, infections that occur in hospitals as a result of patients being treated.

These infections are quite common,

but they can be eliminated very inexpensively.

It's simply that hospitals are not taking the precautions that are needed to reduce them.

Every so often we get a glimpse under the surface and find out how serious the problems are in particular places.

For example, we know that VA hospitals have got very significant problems with failing to treat veterans and with mistreating veterans.

And sometimes we have states that perform what are called cardiac surgery report cards where they

evaluate the rates of mortality and morbidity in cardiac treatments.

And it always turns out that places that people think are terrific

wind up having high mortality at morbidity rates, while other places that don't have

spectacular reputations turn out to do remarkably well. So we get glimpses but nobody really knows how much malpractice

there is other than that we know there's a lot of. This reminds me a bit of

David Goldhill in his book,

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