Have you considered that discharging patients to their home, and moderating their pain medication, may actually be signs of quality care? "The patient gets what they want" is not the only sign of quality.
The author of original article mentioned staying in Indian hospital for 4 nights. Do you think a US hospital will keep you 4 nights for same surgery? I seriously doubt it. You most probably will be released few hours after the surgery or at most after overnight stay. Is the quality of care becomes lower because an Indian hospital kept a patient for 4 days instead of 1 day by US hospital? What does it say about relationship between quality of surgery and all these metrics such as duration of hospital stay, pain medication dosage and duration?
I found a lot of studies which used hospital stay duration and pain medication dosage and duration while in hospital as a proxy to quality of surgery but none that showed these metrics have anything to do with quality of surgery. Also, while quality of surgery takes into consideration the pain medication dosage and duration in the hospital, it ignores the pain medication dosage and duration patient was prescribed after being released from hospital. Similarly the overall healing and recovery time required by patient after the surgery is ignored in favor of the portion of recovery time patient spent in hospital. Hopefully, you see the incentive misalignment and mis-measurements.
You will get what you measure, nothing more nothing less. It is up to you to decide whether a measurement is relevant or not to what you trying to measure. You should not only worry about what a statistical study show but also what the study doesn't show.
Hospitals are full of all kinds of hard-to-kill microorganisms. They really are not good places to stay after a major traumatic event (e.g. surgery) if you don't need the resources of the system; staying will only increase your chances of getting a life-threatening infection. When I get home from the hospital, I try to change out of my clothes as soon as possible for this very reason.
As for pain medication, well...one only needs to look at the enormous rise of opioid addiction and prescription medicine abuse in the USA to see that moderation of these very dangerous medications is in the patient's best interest.
The medical system is far from perfect, but don't operate on the assumption that the people working in the field are ignorant of the problems you're pointing out. There are many things we could be doing better, especially on the transparency and patient education side of things, but it's a huge industry and big ships turn slowly.
One of the biggest flaws with the American health care system and single payer as well is that it's removed the cost component from peoples considerations of what care they should receive. We all pay for this idiocy in the form of our skyrocketing insurance premiums. Do you really think people would want to sit in a hospital if they actually had to pay the nursing staff $1000 per day out of pocket? If they had to pay the janitor $20 for coming into the room to clean up the mess they'd made? $200 for the physician followup? Of course not.
The above poster complaining about withholding opiates and statistically backed discharge time frames is a huge part of what's wrong with health care across the developed world- not just the US.