“When a plane crashes, we don’t say this is confidential proprietary information the airline company owns. We consider this part of public safety. Hospitals should be held to the same standards,” Makary said.
Seems like this number would be higher if they also included HAI's (healthcare associated infections, about 75K additional deaths): https://www.cdc.gov/hai/surveillance/
And it's right, the rates of what are essentially malpractice haven't changed. Arguably despite spending more, we get worse care: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/09/20/22450765...
If infections are included in the numbers then the US is only slightly above average: http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/Health-systems/pati...
The WHO suggests by reducing HAI, the EU could reduce deaths by about 95K/year vs. US's 75K (actually normalizing by population makes the US's number look really bad..assuming stats apply to entire EU's pop of 508-ish million and the US's ~308 million).
I can't find in the cited study (original article) if they included hospital acquired infections like the WHO does. If they didn't then we've a lot of work to do. Likely will never be an issue though, unless we treat the med profession like any other professional service provider with the power of life and death. We need to open the books on investigations, share data publicly, and likely provide more oversight. Also...seems like a wonderful area where big data and ML could contribute to meaningful improvements...