It gets worse, because it's such a probabilistic market. How does any patient tell the difference between a surgeon with a 10% fatality rate and a worse one with an 11% fatality rate? (At the usual estimates of the value of a life in the several millions USD, that 1% is worth a lot.) And if they somehow had that data, how would they adjust for the surgeons' working in different geographies or specializing in slightly different patient types?
This sort of problem is why making hospitals release medical data hasn't been very useful. And if you can't get much reliable signal out of large datasets with rigorous statistical analysis, how are ordinary people and gossip supposed to reach the right answers which could allow market mechanisms work?
This sort of problem is why making hospitals release medical data hasn't been very useful. And if you can't get much reliable signal out of large datasets with rigorous statistical analysis, how are ordinary people and gossip supposed to reach the right answers which could allow market mechanisms work?