More efficient and more expensive?

“The Big Fish Eat the Small Ones,’’  by Peter Brueghel the Elder (1556).

  From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

“The sooner patients can be removed from the depressing influence of general hospital life the more rapid their convalescence.’’

-- Charles H. Mayo, M.D. (1865-1939), American physician and a co-founder of the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn.

The plan for Lifespan and Care New England (CNE) to merge, if regulators approve it, would probably make Rhode Island health care more efficient. It would do this through integrating their hospitals and other units. That would do such things as speeding the sharing of patient information among health-care professionals and streamlining billing. Further, it would probably strengthen medical research and education in the state, much of it through the new enterprise’s very close links with the Alpert Medical School at  Brown University, which, indeed, has pledged to provide at least  $125 million over five years to help develop an  “academic health system’’ as part of the merger. 

The deal, by reducing some red tape (with the state having just one big system instead of two), might make health care in our region more user-friendly for patients,  dissuading more of them from going to Boston’s world-renowned medical institutions, thus keeping more of their money here.

The best example of where the merger could improve health care would be in better connecting Lifespan’s Hasbro Children’s Hospital with  Care New England’s Bradley Hospital, a  psychiatric institution for children, and Women & Infants Hospital.

But would the huge (especially for such a tiny state) new institution have such power that  it would impose much higher prices? Studies have shown that hospital mergers almost inevitably mean higher prices. So insurance companies, as well as poorly insured patients, may eye a Lifespan-CNE merger with trepidation.

And expect job losses, at least for a while, given the need to eliminate the administrative redundancies  created by mergers. Meanwhile, senior- executive salaries in the new entity would probably be  even more stratospheric than they are now at the separate “nonprofit” companies, and I imagine the golden parachutes for departing excess senior execs would blot out the sun.

Meanwhile, Boston will remain a magnet for health care, and so it’s conceivable that  the behemoth and very prestigious Mass General Brigham hospital group would end up absorbing the Lifespan-CNE giant in the end anyway.