Perceptions and reality: no easy answers

A retired MD writes to the American journal Consumer Reports:

AS A RETIRED M.D. (30 years in emergency medicine), I agreed with most of your article about too many tests. However, you forgot to point out one of the big reasons for overtesting: hospital, clinic, and provider “scorecards.” Medicare providers are still being ranked by “patient satisfaction,” which is often driven by whether patients get all the tests they want— even after you explain why they aren’t necessary. Doing an X-ray on every sprained ankle is a classic example in emergency medicine. —Emma K Ledbetter, MD, 'Consumer Reports', March

There's s a genuine problem for policymakers: should we target for improvement only those goals that can be objectively measured, or should we also aim to improve something far more subjective: people's happiness or satisfaction? Ideally there wouldn't be a conflict, but in matters of health there is often a discrepancy between what's actually happening, and what people think or fear is happening. Crime too:

One would imagine that if crime was high, fear of crime would be as well, and alternatively, if crime was low, fear of crime would follow this pattern. What has been found over the years, however, is that crime and fear of crime rarely match up. Fear of crime, Nicole Rader, Oxford Research Encyclopedia, March 2017

In both health and crime, perception and reality aren't easily disentangled. In health, we all know about the placebo effect,whereby an objectively useless pill or procedure does actually improve a patient's condition and his or her perception of that condition. Crime rates might be low, but perceived crime high for a valid reason: people are afraid of, for instance, venturing onto the streets after dark. To add to the confusion: people's perceptions are difficult to measure accurately.

How to deal with perceptions when they might conflict with reality is crucial when trying to formulate policy for anything other than a very small number of people. Take, for example, the question of whether we should incorporate perceptions of crime into an overall crime index that we target for reduction? I'm minded to say no because perceptions can easily be gamed at the expense of objective reality. In today's political climate, it's all too easy to imagine an interested body to work on perceptions - via a massive advertising campaign, perhaps - and doing nothing to reduce crime rates. Similarly with health: we could weight the physically verifiable results of testing, or a placebo, say, more highly than their psychological impacts. (The latter could perhaps be given zero weight, as over-testing and other unnecessary procedures can have negative physiological impacts.) In general, then, perhaps the best approach is to target objectively verifiable indicators and hope that perceptions begin to match them more closely. When it comes to something like our crime example, where people are afraid to walk in the streets because of the fear of being mugged then we'd need to be more creative in coming up with objective targets in addition to goals such as 'reduced number of assaults'.

No easy answers then, to this question that's relevant not only to a Social Policy Bond regime, which relies on targeting explicit, verifiable and meaningful goals, but to any body implementing social policy that uses aggregated data to help formulate policy.