I am uneasy with comparing gun ownership to medical malpractice, but the post is fundamentally correct about the scale of malpractice.
A path breaking Institute of Medicine study in 1999 using a conservative methodology concluded that "44,000 - 98,000 Americans die from medical errors annually." The Institute of Medicine is part of the National Institutes of Health and is not an arm of the trial lawyers.
http://www.iom.edu/report.asp?id=5575
The actual death toll is likely higher, as indicated by Health Grades, Inc., an independent healthcare quality company. It has reported that "[a]n average of 195,000 people in the U.S. died due to potentially preventable, in-hospital medical errors in each of the years 2000, 2001 and 2002." Again, this is not a study done by trial lawyers.
http://www.healthgrades.com/media/english/pdf/HG_Patient_Safety_Study_Final.pdf
Other medical health professionals have corroborated these findings. To the credit of medicine as a profession, they are beginning to accept that there is a problem and are trying to find ways to reduce errors. Dislike of trial lawyers is a poor reason to differ with medicine's own recognition of its malpractice problem.
"Experts estimate that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. That's more than die from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS--three causes that receive far more public attention. Indeed, more people die annually from medication errors than from workplace injuries. Add the financial cost to the human tragedy, and medical error easily rises to the top ranks of urgent, widespread public problems."From the blurb (I'm not going to buy the report), IOM seems to lump everything that occurs anywhere in the hospital together, from the doctor who errs, to the nurse who administers the wrong medication, to the lab tech who reports out incorrect lab result.
That's NOT the same as "Accidental deaths caused by physicians total 120,000 per year".
It's entirely reasonable to have a system that compensates for bad outcomes (why are all the "bad doctors" in just a few specialties: Obstetrics, Orthopedic Surgery and Neurosurgery?) but there are more efficient ways to do it than to allocate 2/3 of the money to the plaintiff's and defense attorneys.