Streeting insists the new public rankings are a necessary way of stamping out poor performance. He wants hospitals judged on quantifiable factors such as A&E waits, cancer care and the size of their budget deficits.
There is colossal cognitive dissonance at the heart of this plan. Streeting himself is the first to acknowledge the impact of structural inequalities on health, recognising that disadvantaged groups in British society are at greater risk of ill health and premature death.
Yet his return to hospital league tables presumes that underperformance is all the fault of those deplorable bad managers and somehow divorced from the socioeconomic realities of the population they serve.
Pretending otherwise is disingenuous. He must know that hospital performance is intricately bound up with the availability (or not) of social care in a region, the prevalence of poverty, the availability of staff, local unemployment levels and innumerable other factors beyond senior hospital managers' control.
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