Grading Surgeons May Be Healthy Practice

"In a society that champions consumer choice and market forces as the bestways to do nearly everything, medicine stands out as an exception. Most Americans know very little about choosing, say, a heart surgeon. They simply take their primary-care physician's advice or blindly pick asurgeon from those covered by their insurance plan. For more than a decade,a handful of states, notably Pennsylvania and New York, have been issuingpublic report cards on individual surgeons that show the rates of death andcomplication of their heart-bypass patients. After all, practicing doctorsand nurses know which surgeons are good, and which are to be avoided.Shouldn't the rest of us know, too? But report cards remain surprisinglycontroversial, and not only among doctors being graded. Daniel Kessler, aStanford University economist, divides the debate into three camps. One saysreport cards boost the quality of health care. A second says they don't havemuch effect, good or bad, because ordinary patients ignore them."Wall Street Journal, David Wessel Read the Full Article