People are so quick to point this out, but the reality is that so many hospitals in the US lack basic standards of cleanliness & care. The CDC recorded 722,000 Hospital-acquired infections (often staph or UTI's) in 2011, one of the highest such rates in the modern world. This is simply unacceptable for a country of our resources.

The WHO's assessment on overall access & quality of care doesn't even put the US in the top 25 in the world while our per capita expenditures remain some of the highest worldwide. We may have a handful of exemplary medical institutions to brag about, but so much of our system is in terrible shape.

Too bad tens (hundreds?) of millions of citizens can't afford to go there.

I don't know about most of the hospitals for sure, but I would assume they are similar. MD Anderson which is the top ranked cancer center in the world according to patient outcomes, doesn't turn anyone away based on their ability to pay. They either work it out or do the work as charity.

Well, participation in single-payer health care will either hurt the top hospitals or it won't. If it doesn't, who cares? If it does, what's stopping them from remaining private and only accepting those who can afford it? Surely the market for the best available care wouldn't evaporate.

Huh? what does this have to do anything?

> Purposes and Goals of Rankings

> 1. Assessment of higher education (processes, and outputs) in the Web.

> Hospital activity is multi-dimensional and this is reflected in its web presence. So the best way to build the ranking is combining a group of indicators that measures these different aspects. Almind & Ingwersen proposed the first Web indicator, Web Impact Factor (WIF), based on link analysis that combines the number of external inlinks and the number of pages of the website, a ratio of 1:1 between visibility and size. This ratio is used for the ranking but adding two new indicators to the size component: Number of documents, measured from the number of rich files in a web domain, and number of publications being collected by Google Scholar database. As it has been already commented, the four indicators were obtained from the quantitative results provided by the main search engines as follows:

Size (S). Number of pages recovered from four engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead. For each engine, results are log-normalised to 1 for the highest value. Then for each domain, maximum and minimum results are excluded and every institution is assigned a rank according to the combined sum. Visibility (V). The total number of unique external links received (inlinks) by a site can be only confidently obtained from Yahoo Search, Live Search and Exalead. For each engine, results are log-normalised to 1 for the highest value and then combined to generate the rank. Rich Files (R). After evaluation of their relevance to academic and publication activities and considering the volume of the different file formats, the following were selected: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), Microsoft Excel (.xls), Microsoft Word (.doc) and Microsoft Powerpoint (.ppt). These data were extracted using Google and merging the results for each filetype after log-normalising in the same way as described before. Scholar (Sc). Google Scholar provides the number of papers and citations for each academic domain. These results from the Scholar database represent papers, reports and other academic items.

so they compared hospitals by googling them?