CNN has the story of a website that allows comparisons by death rate in the cases of pneumonia, heart attack, and heart failure. Currently the CNN online poll shows 60% saying they would not be interested in this information, which is consistent with other research that says people are unwilling to compare hospitals.
However, I think that people would be quite right to heavily discount information about hospital death rates because there is a clear difficulty in separating causality and correlation. What does a high death rate mean? For a similar reason, Economists studying housing markets have long noticed that crime rates are not always big negatives for housing prices. Well, does the crime rate reflect a very good police force that people trust to report crimes to, or does it actually reflect higher crime? Does a high death rate mean that people with difficult cases disproportionately seek out that hospital for their treatment, or is it that they are not good at handling basic cases?
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