That is a highly politicized/editorialized paper, though, with a clear opinion that really belong separate from a scientific paper.

It counts every death that could have been prevented by perfect care, not only harm caused by treatment in otherwise safe individuals.

For example, if someone with heart disease visits hospital and the hospital does not administer best known treatment protocol and the patient dies, that's a "medical error". But at root it is a heart-disease death. Same for cancer.

Some of the highlighted examples from the abstracts are extreme:

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One example of a lethal error of communication between provider and patient occurred when cardiologists failed to warn their 19-year-old patient not to run. The patient had experienced syncope [fainting] while running, and 5 days of inpatient, diagnostic testing were inconclusive; however, his cardiologists knew he was not ready to return to running but failed to warn him against this risk. Having not been warned against running, he resumed running and died 3 weeks later while running.

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The proper analysis is "what are your odds of survival when you choose to seek vs not seek care?"

I think pointing out the deaths caused by improper care are one of the few tools we have to correct the egregious errors that go uncorrected all the time in health care.

For instance a family friend was told she had uterine cancer and was all set to start her doctor's protocol. But at the last minute wanted a second opinion from MD Anderson, the best cancer hospital in the world. After their team looked at her doctor's tests, they ordered their own test, and told her she had bladder cancer instead. They were dumbfounded how her doctor could have missed it, and that protocol would have certainly of led to her death, as bladder cancer treatment must be aggressive and fast.

Yet the only consequence her doctor faced was being told by her that two of MD Anderson's teams thought he was a dumbshit. Other than that, he'll keep on doing what he was doing.

What consequence should he face? Doctors are still people and can absolutely make stupid mistakes just like the rest of us. Any serious diagnosis should always lead to getting a second (or even third!) opinion.

That's a tough question. But right now it is near impossible for them to face any consequences. Even writing about them publicly can result in libel lawsuits. But MD Anderson's team (they don't assign a single doctor to a case) saw the cancer was on a different organ from the same tests that the original doctor used, obviously that doctor made a mistake that could have resulted in my friends death. It would be fair if these mistakes added up like points on your drivers license (adjusted for the difficulty of your medical field). Of course just reforming state medical boards to no longer put protecting doctors as their primary mission, but protecting patients first would be a step in the right direction.

Well no, that's not fair. If your chance of survival was 0% if you didn't choose care, and it's 50% receiving the care you did, it would look pretty good. But if proper care resulted in 100% survival, that statistic looks really really bad.