The Affordable Care Act required Medicare to penalize hospitals with high numbers of heart failure patients who returned for treatment shortly after discharge. New research shows that penalty was associated with fewer readmissions, but also higher rates of death among that patient group.

Because sometimes readmission is necessary for quality care—whether that readmission was driven by later complications, by too-soon original discharge in the Medicare (which is to say Government) pressure to hold down costs first, or by some other factor—but that Government pressure to push the patient out the door also pushes against the patient’s return.  Even when necessary.

Here are a couple of numbers from a study soon to be published in JAMA Cardiology:

One in five heart failure patients returned to the hospital within 30 days before the ACA passed. That dropped to 18.4% after the penalties. Mortality rates increased from 7.2% before the ACA to 8.6% after the penalties….

In other words, an 8% drop in readmissions is associated with a 19% rise in death rates for heart patients.  That’s not a favorable trade-off.

There is a legitimate interest in improving the quality of care for all patients, including those for whose care us taxpayers are paying, but readmission rate is not an accurate measure of that quality.  Readmission rate can only measure…readmission rate.  That metric addresses neither the reasons for readmission nor the reasons for the prior discharge.

Government pressure to hold down readmissions doesn’t quite amount to death panels, but the outcomes seem dismayingly similar.  To be clear, the results of the study do not establish a causal relationship, for heart patients, between the lowered readmission rate and the higher death rate.  However, the magnitude of the apparent association between the two desperately wants further investigation.