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As the Senate debates the Finance Committee’s health care bill, AAJ has launched the first phase of a nationwide ad campaign to educate lawmakers about the epidemic of preventable medical errors and how tort law changes won’t lower costs or cover the uninsured. The ads are running in opinion-leading Washington publications and influential online news sites.

According to the Institute of Medicine, 98,000 people are killed every year by preventable medical errors. “That’s like two 737s crashing every day for a whole year,” says the ad, which will initially run in Beltway publications and web sites nationwide. The ad concludes by posing the rhetorical question, “Would we blame the passengers or the airlines?”

The ads are an extension of AAJ’s efforts to improve the nation’s health care system by addressing preventable medical errors instead of trying to take away long-established Constitutional rights.

The Government Accountability Office and Congressional Budget Office have both said taking away patients’ rights will not significantly lower health care costs and found no evidence of so-called “defensive medicine.” Nonetheless, the insurance industry, political opponents of reform and others members of the health care industrial complex have continued to use patients’ rights as bargaining chips during this debate.

To learn more about AAJ’s ad campaign and the role of medical negligence in the health care debate, visit www.98000reasons.org.

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