NO STUPID IDEA LEFT BEHIND

Americans love standardized tests. The latest wrinkle is in Massachusetts, where the agency that gives state workers health insurance plans to identify the most efficient doctors and send more work their way.

There are weird echoes of this from the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind act, in which schools are rated and, if deemed failures for two years in a row, can be abandoned for others. As Michael Winerip’s damningly solid reporting has shown in The New York Times, the act is entirely arbitrary and punishing to the schools that pass, as well as those that fail. Passing schools are flooded with new students; when the schools can’t serve all their students adequately, it increases their chances of becoming failing schools.

There could be benefits to the Massachusetts health plan, but not the ones dominating today’s Boston Herald article, which is by Jennifer Heldt Powell. It isn’t until the tenth paragraph that study organizers note, in a paraphrase, that “The intention is to ... determine what treatments work best and promote those practices” as well as to “reward more efficient doctors.”

Best for Massachusetts and other states considering this approach to focus on those instead of insisting thousands of state workers pack the offices of a few more-efficient doctors, whose work would inevitably become less efficient -- punishing patients and competent doctors just as Bush’s education act punishes students and good schools.