A good friend has started telling her husband, “don’t let them take me.”

She’s not a drug dealer or a tax cheat terrified of the cops finding her, but someone who has seen both her parents enter hospitals for minor problems . . . and leave dead. The “they” she doesn’t want are EMTs who might load her into an ambulance and take her to the nearest ER (unless it’s after a car crash or other trauma; she’s not completely crazy).

So I’m not going to tell her that HealthGrades, a private company in Golden, Col., that rates hospitals, nursing homes and physicians found that from 2004 to 2006, medical errors at U.S. hospitals killed 270,491 people. And that’s just Medicare patients.