Medical errors are the 6th leading cause of the death in the U.S.
The first major report on medical errors in the US is from over two decades ago. In 1999, The Err is Human from the Institution of Medicine estimated 98,000 deaths due to error. At the time, this would be the sixth leading cause of death in the country.
A study in 2010 found that this number had almost doubled to 180,000 deaths. And by 2013, the estimate ranged from 210,000 to 440,000 deaths per year. This landed medical errors as the third leading cause of death trailing heart disease and cancer.
If the medical malpractice researchers’ estimates are correct, medical errors would be somewhere between the 3rd or 4th leading cause of death in the U.S. The mortality figures change every year but cancer and heart disease are regularly the top two causes of death.