Long-term research and studies are meaningless if the findings are casually tossed aside and ignored.

When the life-saving recommendations they offer are never implemented, glaring problems remain unsolved.

The American public should be outraged that the critical problems highlighted 10 years ago in a highly publicized federal report titled “To Err is Human” have not been addressed.

A national investigation by Hearst Newspapers indicates that as many as 2 million Americans have died of preventable medical mistakes over the last decade.

Many of those deaths could have been averted if the report's findings had been taken to heart and hospitals made safer.

Instead of working to implement patient safety measures to address the concerns raised in the report, the federal government and most states did little in that regard. Some states implemented regulations only to have them ignored without penalty.

The Hearst investigation found special interests worked to ensure a mandatory national reporting system recommended in the report was never implemented.

That is outrageous. The estimated 200,000 deaths a year from preventable medical errors top the number resulting from motor vehicle accidents, the official leading cause of accidental death in the United States.

Texas has attempted to address the problem, but not successfully.

In 2003, Texas passed a medical-error reporting law, but it was badly designed and abolished in 2007.

The last Legislature approved yet another bill to establish a medical-error reporting system but failed to appropriate any funding. The lack of funding makes it highly unlikely that the system is going anywhere. That should be of great concern to Texas residents.

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