Orac doesn’t mince words with his take on Medicare’s poorly thought-out plan:

It would make a lot more sense to set standards for the maximum rates of these particular infectious complications for each hospital based on the mix of patients and the rates that could reasonably be expected if the best evidence-based infection control guidelines are used. Hospitals that exceed that rate by, say, two standard deviations (or even less) would then be penalized in this manner until they got their hospital-acquired infection rates down to an acceptable range. To sweeten the pot, hospitals that exceed these standards by two standard deviations could receive more money for their services. Such a system would make far more sense than this proposal.