A Different Way of Ranking Hospitals

appeal

What DO either of the candidates offer that would separate them from their opponent? Taxes? What will be lost? Where could that money be spent better?

Troop return: What has been accomplished and what could/should still be done?

Prisons: Are we educating inmates to be better criminals or is there ANY hope of rehabilitation?

Voting: Must we ALL be gazillionaires in order to run? What happened to "everyman" and his ability do a job in government?

Tax structure: How can we allow "entertainers" and sports "heros" to go on without paying their fair share to the society that pays them?

What happened to being "proud to be an American"? If you can remain an illiterate immigrant whether legal or otherwise, where are we going to end up? All of the initial citizens of this country were immigrants, but they had a view of the future. What is OUR VIEW now?

How's that? Enough?

Strontium-90 in the 1930s?

I believe you misspoke. CU may have been in its infancy in the 1930s, but I doubt if they heard of strontium-90 before the 1950s after a few years of atomic testing.

Avery Comarow responds: You are right, of course. In its first issue (May 1936), Consumer Reports, then called Consumers Union Reports, had milk on the cover, which was what I recalled. But it was a report on the difference between Grade A and Grade B milk. The report on strontium-90 in milk was in 1959.

Right idea, wrong industry

The difference between comparing hospitals and, say, automobiles is that with an automobile, one has a massive number of choices from which to choose. Not so with hospitals. It's not like in the middle of an emergency someone is going to pull out a comparison chart and say 'take me to Hospital B - it has better care" when Hospital A is only minutes away.

Further, some hospitals take some insurances, some don't. This was all about Medicare, so presumably they accept that one at these institutions. But if you are privately insured or locked in an HMO, often times you are required to be pre-approved to visit a non-member hospital, and can be charged if you do so even in the event of what you think is an emergency.

This 'comparison' is interesting in an academic sense, but as far as impacting an individual's choice of an individual health care facility, my feeling is it will have a minimal impact because there just isn't any competition to drive an improvement in care or services.