Speaking as someone whose father was a physician, I feel a few of your comments are unfounded.

Generally, I think there must be a way to hold most problematic doctors accountable while not causing excessive burdens for most good doctors. Also, any system will not be perfect, and the goal should be to maximize the health of most patients.

> it's a problem of "business as usual." It's a thousand doctors following procedures with a 0.1% error rate and 999 thinking, "nothing bad's happened to me so I must be doing everything fine,"

I see no evidence of this, and I doubt you have the audacity to say this in the presence of your own physicians.

> they could each reduce that to a 0.001% error rate with a simple checklist or by actually washing their hands

I'm not sure where you live where doctors do not wash their hands, or how you know that they do not, but wherever I have been, doctors wash their hands vigorously. Infection in hospitals is common. Everything needs to be super sterile. It's more than just washing hands. Everything needs to be packaged air tight and used once in one part of the body, and then thrown away. It's already much more involved than you're suggesting.

Doctors complete between 11 and 16 years of training [1]

Doctors spend an average of 60 hours working per week. They work on average 1.5 times more than the average American [2]

Doctors have too many patients and too little time.

They are already well educated and don't have time for checklists to remind them of every little detail they learned during their 10-year long training program. They don't sleep much and don't get paid very well for the debt that they incur.

Many doctors got into the field because they want to help people.

My father was a physician until 2004ish, and the stress induced by bureaucracy nearly killed him. He was a great doctor. You're suggesting making the system more complex. I'm saying, that's going to make patient care worse, not better.

If you choose to look only at court cases and do not read medical research, then trust is required in this system. Any procedural changes should be vetted by researchers using the scientific method, not bureaucrats who seek to make unscientific sweeping changes based on anecdotes to further their own political careers.

> Put another way, if you put someone's life in your hands and you're not focusing a significant percentage of your efforts on procedures designed to radically reduce risk, then you're engaged in gross negligence.

This is the job of a doctor. They focus on reducing risks to your health.

The solution isn't to add arbitrary checklists and make doctors more busy. The solution is to use the scientific method to add doctors, make our population healthier and capable of maintaining their own health, and reduce the load of patients per doctor.

> So my medical malpractice reform would make medicine more like other industries with far better safety records. It would include a requirement that hospitals post their mistakes on their front door as people walk in.

At first you argue against tort reform and then you argue for it.

I think things like Zocdoc will help good doctors be recognized and allow patients to self select their level of care. Reviews are just one thing. It's a complicated system that needs to balance many factors in order to maximize patient health.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=how...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&client=ubuntu&hs=o9p&...