Bigger is Not Always Better: How Consolidation in Health Care Hurts Patients

By TIMOTHY HOFF The recent news that U.S. retail giant CVS Health will purchase insurance giant Aetna, in part to gain millions of new customers for its prescription drug and primary care businesses, is another ominous sign for patients.  Patients should worry about all the continued consolidation in the health care industry, whether it is Walgreens buying Rite-Aid to increase their pharmacy clout; Anthem’s ill-fated attempt to purchase Cigna to become an insurance monopoly; or hospital systems like Partners Healthcare in Boston trying to buy the hospitals and physician networks in and around its service area to control patient flow and increase market share.  Consolidation often limits competition, and when that happens in market-based systems especially the result, says good research, is often that the cost of health care goes up.  This does not benefit patients, who increasingly are paying more out of pocket for their insurance and for the services they receive from doctors, hospitals, labs, and drug companies. The Affordable Care Act did little to encourage greater competition in the health care marketplace.  That was probably by design, since those creating the legislation held an implicit assumption that the bigger players in each of the different industry areas like insurance, pharmacy, and hospital care could deliver given the size of the insurance expansion the ACA would promote.  As we see from the existing premium inflation on the exchanges across the countr...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Aetna Consolidation CVS Health value-based care Source Type: blogs