What are your odds of having complications in the hospital?

If you check into the hospital, research has found that your personal odds of having a significant, unexpected complication (meaning one that could lay you up for weeks, leave you permanently disabled, or kill you) are 1 in 25. Since you'll likely enjoy more than a few hospital trips in your lifetime, as almost all of us will, that risk will multiply.

Now, to be fair, there's another side to these terrifying numbers that we rarely see, and that's how many patients are healed without a hitch. It would be nice to see front-page newspaper articles screaming "US hospitals safely treated 12 million patients this year—and directly saved the lives of at least a third!" But, to quote a famous journalism adage, newspapers don't write stories about planes that land.