There was an item in today’s Raleigh News and Observer reporting on the fact that many North Carolina hospitals took part in a national program that grades hospitals based on safety. The following is a quote from the CEO of  the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute, the organization that established the grading system:

We are looking at how safe it is for you at various hospitals relative to each other. We’re not saying that somebody who got a B or a C is a horrible hospital. But we want everybody to get A’s.

Now if the nonsense escapes you, note that the hospitals are grades relative to each other, not according to an absolute standard, so if everyone got an A it would first mean that there were no differences among them and second it would tell us nothing about actual safety. In fact it could mean that they were all equally unsafe. And this is from the person who heads the company that doles out the grades and designs the test.