The Institute of Medicine published a report saying that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die each year due to medical errors in hospitals.
A catastrophe like TWA 800 or EgyptAir 990 causes air travelers to gasp at the unimaginable horror of being in such a wrong place and time. Seldom, though, does it give us much pause in booking our next reservation. We know that airplanes almost never fall out of the sky. That's why it's such big news when it happens.
In 1998 some 600 million people traveled on commercial airliners in the U.S. without a single fatality. In fact, each year more than twice as many people lose their lives on our nation's highways than have perished in airline crashes in the entire history of commercial air travel.