Health Affairs New Issue: Market Concentration

The September issue of Health Affairs includes a group of studies examining different aspects of health care markets: market concentration, preserving competition, and provider networks. Other September studies provide updates on Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage. The issue was supported in part by The Commonwealth Fund, which provided funding for the studies on market concentration. Insurers drive down hospital and physician prices The rapid pace of consolidation in health care markets has continued: From 1998 to 2015, there were 1,412 US hospital mergers, with 40 percent of them after 2009. To examine how provider and insurer market concentration interact and are correlated with prices, Richard Scheffler and Daniel Arnold, both of the University of California, Berkeley, used commercial claims from a national database of fifty million insured individuals to compute hospital admission and physician visit prices in the period 2010–14. They examined data for primary care physicians, cardiologists, hematologists/oncologists, orthopedists, and radiologists to compute measures of market concentration. According to the authors, in markets where both insurers and providers were highly concentrated, insurers were able to reduce hospital admission prices by 5 percent, and the fees of cardiologists, radiologists and hematologists/oncologists by 4–19 percent. However, there was no evidence of insurer bargaining power on the price of visits to primary care physicians or orthopedis...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Elsewhere@ Health Affairs journal Source Type: blogs