Hospital Kept Vegetative Patient on Life Support to Boost Survival Rates

This is classic Goodhart's law [1]. Humans or systems of humans will automatically game any metric that is used to measure them. Whenever you start using a number of measure performance, people start to forget about ethics.

This is also happening in university education these days where professor's performance is being measured by metrics that only roughly correlate to teaching ability. So, profs spend more time ensuring their metrics don't fall below the acceptable value than they do trying to improve their teaching performance. In other words, introducing these bad metrics to somehow measure and improve teaching performance, actually results in worse teaching performance.

[1] "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." or

"when a feature of the economy is picked as an indicator of the economy, then it inexorably ceases to function as that indicator because people start to game it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

This is why healthcare is broken. I’ve also heard that hospitals can lose accreditation for having bad outcomes and will turn away risky patients which is just as horrible.

So, basically, everybody wins

Isn't this the perfect case of having the wrong incentives?!