The government often gets blamed for stifling competition, particularly in health care. Now, Medicare wants to spur consumers to think about quality when choosing a hospital.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is shelling out $1.9 million for ads in 58 daily newspapers in 49 states comparing hospitals to one another. The ads will show how well patients said they got the help they needed when they needed it, and how consistently the hospital gives surgical patients antibiotics. They’ll also show the statewide averages for those benchmarks. All told, the ads will include more than 2,500 hospitals, the Associated Press reports.

The Medicare honchos want you to be intrigued enough by the ads to surf on over to their Web site Hospital Compare site for more info when you’re considering which hospital to patronize.

Publicity over changes made to the site in March helped quadruple traffic on the site, to about 600,000 page views a week. HHS secretary Michael Leavitt tickled an audience of journalists then by saying hospital quality measurement is just leaving the “Pong era.” (We couldn’t resist reprising some Pong footage from the YouTube archive.)

Since we don’t all live Lake Wobegon, some facilities are faring worse than others. Just 41% of patients at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., got help when they needed it, compared with 57% at Georgetown University Hospital, the AP reports.

Critics have called Hospital Compare a decent start, but woefully lacking in “outcomes” measures – ones that tell you how patients actually fare after being treated at the hospital. Instead, the site mostly measures procedures, or how well the facility follows guidelines like giving heart-attack patients aspirin on admission. The site’s only mortality gauge now – for heart attack and heart failure – lump virtually all hospitals into an oversize “normal” category, with just a handful ranked above or below normal.

Kerry Weems, the Medicare agency’s acting administrator, said the money CMS is splashing out on advertising doesn’t come at the expense of improving Hospital Compare. “We think the money we’ve spent is well spent,” Weems said. CMS plans to add pneumonia mortality rankings in June –- and may even provide a more useful way to compare mortality rates.