The Affordable Care Act also offered protections that allow for preexisting conditions, as people know, that you're provided coverage and you can maintain steady coverage. And that's an important part of being able to stay in care and do better over the long run.

What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?

I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.

You can't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery. Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that's prepared for the unexpected.

The definition of what it means to be dying has changed radically. We are able to extend people's lives considerably, including sometimes, good days.

Good checklists, on the other hand are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything--a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps--the ones that even the highly skilled professional using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.

We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way norms and standards change.