The sorting out is exactly the problem. A mistake in an aircraft, combined with some bad luck, leads to a crash. Everyone knows what that is and it triggers a government review.
In medicine, most mistakes are not obvious. A doctor who makes 5 or 10 times as many mistakes as average might be known to a few colleagues as "that guy who probably shouldn't have his license", but the vast majority of those won't even lead to malpractice cases, let alone clear-cut malpractice verdicts.
That said, we should be engaged in understanding and judging these cases, and figure out how to properly attribute deaths to preventable medical errors. It will be messy but the status quo is a large-scale ongoing disaster.
> A mistake in an aircraft, combined with some bad luck, leads to a crash.
Not always. You can actually push your luck pretty hard in an airplane and get away with it 99% of the time. There are pilots out there who are accidents waiting to happen.
The point is that there is almost never a single cause for any accident. It is almost always due to a confluence of multiple events. This should be expected. Engineers can be reasonably expected to think of the contingencies related to the system they are actively working on, but generally work under the assumption that the rest of the device is functioning normally. A nonfatal error in a normal situation can become fatal when combined with two or three other nonfatal conditions.
In medicine, most mistakes are not obvious. A doctor who makes 5 or 10 times as many mistakes as average might be known to a few colleagues as "that guy who probably shouldn't have his license", but the vast majority of those won't even lead to malpractice cases, let alone clear-cut malpractice verdicts.
That said, we should be engaged in understanding and judging these cases, and figure out how to properly attribute deaths to preventable medical errors. It will be messy but the status quo is a large-scale ongoing disaster.