Evaluating your hospital

Let the marketplace weed out the bad performers! That's another favorite refrain of conservatives these days. But that assumes the consumer can be well-informed about choices in products and services.

In some cases, we do. Consumers Reports extensively reviews products such as automobiles. Their analysis of products, especially if they find something unacceptable, can sway buyers. Manufacturers scramble to fix problems.

But in at least one glaring case, we don't. And it is killing us. That case is the safety and effectiveness of hospitals. Marty Makary, M.D., wrote a summary for Newsweek of his new book Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won't Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care. He tells a few horror stories to make his point that the current practices make money at the expense of our health and the overall cost of health care in America would drop if hospitals had to report to the public on their successes and failures.

Makary knows this will work because the state of New York made that requirement in the early 1990s. One hospital had an 18% mortality rate in heart bypass operations. In six years it was cut to 1.7%.