The claims have become almost ubiquitous. Hospital CEO after hospital CEO stands at a podium and promises the merger being announced will improve quality and lower costs.
Once deals close, though, there tends to be little, if any, follow-up to determine whether those things actually happened. A new Journal of the American Medical Association study adds to the growing body of evidence that they don’t. The authors looked across a large swath of the country’s hospitals and physicians found that while quality did improve marginally, the prices paid for services delivered by health system hospitals and doctors was significantly higher than their non-system peers.
“You start to feel really hopeful when you hear about this, ‘Yeah, we can really improve health care,’ and then when you look at it, it’s just not there,” said Nancy Beaulieu, a study author and research associate in Harvard Medical School’s department of health care policy.
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