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Few things are deadlier than doctors’ screw-ups. NASA’s chief toxicologist calculated in 2013 that medical error kills between 210,000 and 440,000 Americans each year. Only heart disease and cancer have a higher body count. Some progress has been made: The number of hospital-acquired conditions dropped 17% from 2010-14, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. But that report excluded diagnostic errors that occur in outpatient settings—such as missing a cancerous lesion—and cause some 100,000 deaths per year. (James B. Lieber, 5/17)

As unusual as the 2016 presidential election has been, one obvious aspect has gone largely unnoticed: By the time the next president of the United States is inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2017, he or she will have reached or come close to reaching 70 years old. That all the remaining major candidates are among the "young old" at this stage of the election process is unprecedented. Yet, in spite of the stakes for the American people, there is no independent source that can provide an adequate accounting of the medical condition of the next president. (Art Caplan and Jonathan D. Moreno, 5/17)

We keep hearing that Donald Trump is vastly different ideologically from Congressional Republicans, but the reality is considerably less dramatic. Whatever Trump actually believes in his, er, heart, he is running on a range of conventional GOP positions: Tax cuts for the rich; hostility to Democratic efforts to solve the immigration problem; and, of course, repeal of Obamacare. And on that latter front, here’s another data point: On the very same day that we learned that the Affordable Care Act has brought the uninsured rate down into single digits, it emerged that Trump thinks advocating for the repeal of the ACA will be a big political winner for him in the presidential campaign. (Greg Sargent, 5/17)

The case involves the politically sensitive Affordable Care Act and one of the most polarizing aspects of the law — the provision that employers’ healthcare plans cover the cost of birth control. When the law was first proposed, religious groups complained that it would violate their moral principles to offer insurance coverage for contraception to female employees. So the Obama administration devised a half-way provision: By informing insurers of their objections, they could avoid fines, and the insurance companies or the government would pay for the coverage. Still, the religious groups demurred. They said forcing them to provide the required notice would make them complicit in what they considered morally objectionable behavior. The government thought that was a stretch and refused to give them a pass that would result in denying contraception coverage for employees who wanted it. (5/17)

Hillary Clinton wants Americans to have access to Medicare starting at age 50. It's an idea well worth considering, not least because so many Americans aged 50 to 64 who don't have job-based health insurance struggle to afford the relatively high premiums they're charged for private plans. And Medicare is a popular, battle-tested and relatively inexpensive insurance system, costing less per person than private insurance. (5/17)

Medicare as it now stands is not perfect. Although it is a single-payer system within our larger market-based system, it uses the same profit-seeking providers, and its out-of-pocket costs are also growing. And it doesn’t cover everything – for example, long-term care. If the United States extended Medicare to the entire population, it would make sense also to convert to a largely nonprofit provider system. Reducing the perverse role of profit-seeking among providers, with the propensity to over-diagnosis and over-treatment, would yield much greater savings. We could then expand the Medicare benefit package and get rid of out-of-pocket costs altogether. (Marcia Angell, 5/17)

One revolutionary aspect of this consortium is that the participating researchers have agreed to share not just data but also revenues from intellectual property rights derived from their discoveries. This is a crucial step — progress slows when researchers, cancer centers, and others keep information to themselves in the quest for more funding, licensing deals, and top billing in prestigious journals. (Tom Coburn and Daniel P. Petrylak, 5/17)

Google and Apple have some bright ideas about the future of health care. Not so long ago, AT&T and Verizon Communications had similar ideas: a networked world of devices and services that would revolutionize how medicine is practiced in the U.S. and, in the process, tap into a huge new vein of business. So far, it hasn't worked out that way for the telecom companies. (Scott Mortiz and Gerrit De Vynck, 5/17)

In 2007, I introduced a bill to provide hearing aid coverage for kids. The idea for the bill came from an Iowa mom, Amy Pettit, who told a group of friends that her preschooler didn’t pass his hearing screening. She was surprised and frustrated to learn her health insurance wouldn’t cover the cost of his hearing aids. She worried how this impacted other children if their families couldn’t afford hearing aids. My bill was simple — to make audiological and hearing aid coverage for Iowa’s children an essential health benefit — but getting it past the insurance lobby was not. (State Sen. Janet Petersen, 5/17)

Here’s a distinction Franklin County would rather not have: It is one of 15 Ohio counties chosen for an education campaign to keep people from overdosing on fentanyl. Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic narcotic used to treat severe pain, caused more than 500 overdose deaths in Ohio in 2014. That’s a sixfold increase from the previous year. The drug is up to 50 times stronger than heroin, and abusers often lace heroin with fentanyl. (5/18)

After 46 years entrenched in the daily intricacies of medical practice, I have come to the stark realization that our health care system is seriously flawed, and in desperate need of reform. Here’s why. (Joel Mascaro, 5/17)