It’s Time to Retire the Phrase “Free Kill”

This article was submitted to multiple Florida media outlets for consideration as an opinion piece.”
That signals seriousness and transparency.

I hear the words “Free Kill” and I hear not analysis, but accusation. It is a phrase designed to inflame, not explain. It is spoken in legislative halls, repeated in news coverage, and amplified on social media because it is emotionally potent. But emotional potency is not the same thing as moral clarity.

I have worked in trauma bays and critical care units where alarms continue to ring in your ears long after the patient is gone. I have peeled off scrubs stiff with sweat and blood, stood under fluorescent locker-room lights that reveal every crease of exhaustion, and replayed the day in my mind while asking the same questions every clinician asks after a loss: Did I miss something? Should I have moved faster? Should I have waited?

Medicine at the sharp end is not practiced in paragraphs. It is practiced in seconds. Decisions are made with incomplete information, malfunctioning equipment, delayed lab results, and bodies that do not behave as textbooks promise they will. You act because not acting is often the more lethal choice. Emotion is suppressed in the moment and felt later, when the day is over and the questions begin.

Now imagine finishing such a shift and hearing someone describe the outcome as a “Free Kill.” Not a tragedy. Not a complex failure. Not even an arguable case of negligence. A kill. Free. As if the work were casual. As if the loss were transactional. As if those who tried to prevent death somehow benefited from it.

Intentional killing by physicians has occurred in rare, aberrational cases. When it does, it is prosecuted as crime. But that is not what the phrase “Free Kill” describes in Florida’s policy debate. The phrase imputes intent where most disputes involve alleged negligence, system failure, or statutory limits on civil recovery. To collapse those distinctions is not moral seriousness; it is moral laziness.

And let me be clear: I am not opposed to accountability. I support the repair or repeal of Florida Statute §768.21(8). I lost my own mother to negligence in a Florida hospital. I know personally what it is to sit on the other side of the bedrail. I know the anger. I know the questions. I know the ache that does not resolve.

But I also know that if we want meaningful reform—if we want safer systems, clearer disclosure, and fair mechanisms of compensation—we must describe the problem accurately. Unintentional medical deaths occur not because medicine is indifferent, but because it is human and practiced at enormous scale. Millions of decisions are made every day in imperfect systems. Errors happen. Fatigue happens. Communication breaks down. Electronic systems fail. None of that is improved by language that treats complexity as criminality.

When media outlets repeat “Free Kill” as shorthand, they flatten a serious policy debate into a slogan. Words matter. They shape public understanding and legislative appetite. If you use this phrase in coverage, you should be willing to run an opposing view explaining why it is misleading.

Accountability does not begin with accusation. It begins with clarity—about what the law does, what it does not do, and how reform can strengthen patient safety without caricaturing the very people whose cooperation is necessary to improve it.

Those of us who have worked at the bedside do not ask for euphemism. We ask for accuracy. When you have spent the day holding death at bay with bare hands, the last thing you need is rhetoric that substitutes outrage for understanding.

Submitted by: Philip Glickstein, CPTC, CTBS, CST