Daily Inspiration Quote by Timothy Murphy

It reads like market-libertarian futurism spoken in the calm voice of managerial reform: make safety measurable, make prices comparable, and competition will do the moral work for us. The intent is bluntly instrumental. Patient safety is framed not as a professional ethic or a public guarantee, but as a performance metric that providers will chase the way airlines chase on-time stats. The promise is seductive: if you can quantify harm and publish it, bad actors either improve or lose customers.

The subtext is where the argument sharpens. It assumes patients can behave like informed shoppers, that “accurate information” will circulate cleanly, and that hospitals won’t game the numbers. It also quietly shifts responsibility away from institutions and regulators onto “the market” and the consumer: if outcomes are visible, then choosing poorly becomes partly your fault. “Lowest prices” sits beside “best record of patient safety” as if the two naturally align, when in real systems they often collide. The rhetoric tries to dissolve that tension by treating transparency as a magic solvent.

Context complicates the attribution. A soldier born in 1751 would have lived before modern hospitals, anesthesia, germ theory, and anything resembling today’s consumer health policy. The language sounds late-20th/early-21st century: quality improvement dashboards, pay-for-performance, public reporting, the post-scandal hunger for accountability. Read that way, it’s less a period statement than a distinctly modern faith that data can substitute for trust. It works because it offers a simple villain (opacity) and a clean fix (competition + metrics), even as it sidesteps the messiest truth: safety is often a staffing, funding, and governance problem, not an information problem.