While in many situations in life you get what you pay for, it appears that may not always be the case with healthcare. A recent study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that the costs to hospitals to treat their patients are not necessarily commensurate with the quality of healthcare that the patients receive, including their risk of death.

With the healthcare debate making front page headlines, this is a particularly relevant issue, and hospitals are under increasing pressure to reduce their costs while improving the standard of care, creating a delicate balancing act between the two issues. A great deal of concern is rooted in the perception that when hospitals lower expenditures by either eliminating tests and procedures or reducing the time of a patient’s stay, it ultimately ends up costing more because of the consequences of cutting corners.

It appears that those concerns may be unfounded. A recent study looking at Medicare patients that were discharged from hospitals for a variety of chronic conditions determined that in certain cases, the long-term expenses for treating patients in low cost environments was not that much higher than in high cost facilities. Researchers arrived at their conclusions by studying the relationship between hospital care and certain variables that included 30-day mortality rates, readmission rates, and six-month costs of inpatient care. A “quality of care score” was then established based on several performance indicators.

Using these indicators, researchers found no definitive proof that low cost medical care resulted in higher costs in the long term, though it varied depending on the condition being treated. For heart failure patients, those treated in high cost hospitals had higher quality of care scores than in lower cost facilities, but the opposite was true for patients with pneumonia.

Both high cost and low cost hospitals had similar numbers for 30-day readmission rates (for heart failure and pneumonia), but patients seen in low cost hospitals still incurred lower overall expenses than their high cost counterparts.

The take home message is that contrary to conventional wisdom, when hospitals reduce expenses by shortening the time that patients spend in a facility, it does not necessarily have an adverse effect on the costs or quality of long term patient care, at least for certain conditions.

The implications could be significant in light of the current healthcare debate. In the United States, healthcare costs have been rising significantly for the past two decade. In fact, in 2008, they exceeded $2.3 trillion. This amounts to about $7600 per resident, or 16.2% of the gross national produce (GDP), which is among the highest in the industrialized world.

Because of this, stemming the ballooning costs of medical care has become a priority for policymakers, not only to provide greater access to healthcare, but to help stabilize the economy as a whole.