Illinois Near Top of the List for Medical Malpractice

As the song goes "doctor doctor, give me the news", the news for Illinois is not great when it comes to medical malpractice as new data puts the Land of Lincoln near the top of the naughty list for doctors behaving badly.

While I was given the nickname of "Doc" nearly 40 years ago, I am the opposite of a real doctor as I was intolerant of all the education necessary to save lives. According to 24/7 Wall St, there are some doctors in Illinois that don't fare much better than I would when it comes to save medical treatment. They just crunched numbers from the National Practitioner Data Bank of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population and Housing Unit Estimates program to determine which states have the highest rates of malpractice. They placed Illinois as the 8th worst state in America for medical negligence. Here's some data they shared about what medical malpractice looks like in Illinois:

• Medical malpractice payouts, 2015-2024: $161.52 per capita ($2.0 billion total)
• Average medical malpractice payout, 2015-2024: $709,014 (2,859 cases)
• Deaths from medical and surgical care complications, 2021-2023: 1.0 per 100,000 people

Considering the fact that the data covered a decade of medical malpractice, that's a terrible result from Illinois. Let's also be clear that the vast majority of doctors are honorable and do life-saving work. Consider how many millions of medical cases are handled by Illinois doctors every year and the 2,859 malpractice incidents doesn't seem so bad. However, I'd highly recommend that you make sure your doctor really is a doctor and not just some loser with a nickname.