Health care report cards' public disclosure of patient health outcomes at the level of the individual physician or hospital or bothmay address important informational asymmetries in markets for health care, but they may also give doctors and hospitals incentives to decline to treat more...

'Defensive medicine' is a potentially serious social problem: if fear of liability drives health care providers to administer treatments that do not have worthwhile medical benefits, then the current liability system may generate inefficiencies much larger than the costs of compensating...