A Bedtime Story
Let's say that policymakers decided it was time to do something about what they perceive to be the poor performance of hospitals run by cities and municipalities. Now, these policymakers are not medical professionals, they don't work in hospitals or have a clue what happens in hospitals, but they apparently stayed in a Holiday Inn Express recently which endowed them with sufficient expertise that whatever policies they put in place can be considered great even absent medical training or input. They create a set of goals, again, no need for input from medical folks, that don’t actually signal effectiveness and draw lots of lines in the sand as to where they’d like hospitals to be without understanding what either the metrics do or if the lines in the sand mean anything. They then assign label to those lines so it will be clear who is and is not failing within their excellent system that they do not understand and that does not mean what they think. They run with those very polic...