Then what we’re left with is de-facto compulsory regulation that gives us very little value. It will tell me if the hospital I plan to go to will more than likely kill me but that is something the media can tell me already. Anything qualitative from there I would have to work out with my own legwork.

You’ve got it. Not very scary really.

The UK publishes school league tables in cluding exam performance but also other dimensions. Is that the sort of thing we mean? I like the idea of the setor or industry doing this for themselves. I also think that movement in this direction is inevitable because citizens and customers are doing it for themselves anyway. Governments and corporations are the laggards in this case

Any answers regulation would provide will be limited at best. I would argue it would be next to useless.

Information is really key to decisions people make with their purchases. The criticism I have of your suggestion is that the information you want to regulate is already out there.

Choice has been providing general consumer information since 1959 and Hewitt do a nationwide survey of the best employers in oz. Essentially if there is a demand for it, there is a market for it.

There isn’t anything specifically available in Australia as yet for doctor ratings from patients but if there is a demand for it then I can’t see why it couldn’t happen. I think with medical care most people would opt for word of mouth when it comes to doctor recommendations.

In light of this I find it hard to justify any reason for any more regulation.

It is certainly possible to stuff up mandatory disclosure especially in health. But one can deal with those problems in a range of ways.

Dranove, David, Kessler, Daniel P., McClellan, Mark B. and Satterthwaite, Mark A., “Is More Information Better? The Effects of ‘Report Cards’ on Health Care Providers” (January 2002).

Health care report cards - public disclosure of patient health outcomes at the level of the individual physician and/or hospital - may address important informational asymmetries in markets for health care, but they may also give doctors and hospitals incentives to decline to treat more difficult, severely ill patients. Whether report cards are good for patients and for society depends on whether their financial and health benefits outweigh their costs in terms of the quantity, quality, and appropriateness of medical treatment that they induce. Using national data on Medicare patients at risk for cardiac surgery, we find that cardiac surgery report cards in New York and Pennsylvania led both to selection behavior by providers and to improved matching of patients with hospitals. On net, this led to higher levels of resource use and to worse health outcomes, particularly for sicker patients. We conclude that, at least in the short run, these report cards decreased patient and social welfare.

Has there been economic work based on the work of bodies like the ISO? Perhaps that could inform the debate; including the cautionary tale of how even the best institutions can be stacked out for commercial reasons.

But I’m not sure why the inadequacies of the government should stop us from encouraging the elaboration of standards by those who might wish to report to them - to their own advantage and the ultimate benefit of many.