Dartmouth Atlas's Skinner on high-cost hospitals

Massachusetts Institute of Technology study suggesting that more expensive hospitals in New York provided higher-quality healthcare seemed to contradict findings from the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. Dartmouth's Jon Skinner, a researcher with the Atlas, said the two studies are looking at pretty different data. Because the MIT study looks only at data from the emergency room, it's impossible to know what happens after that initial episode of care and whether the higher spending would continue to translate into better quality. Skinner and MIT's researcher Joseph Doyle did agree on one key point: We’re not going to get better healthcare outcomes by simply throwing money at low-cost hospitals to make them high-cost hospitals.