Our Research in the Media

This week, Petris Center Director Dr. Scheffler was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Bay Area doctor’s legal fight highlights medical industry pressures,” which detailed one doctor’s struggles with an increasingly consolidated health care system. Recently, the Petris Center released a new report in Health Affairs called “Consolidation Trends In California’s Health Care System: Impacts On ACA Premiums And Outpatient Visit Prices,” which deals directly with these pressures intensifying in California. The SF Chronicle article describes this doctor’s legal battle with her former hospital, then moves to a broader discussion of the current health care market, citing Dr. Scheffler.

“A health care system looks at cost and productivity, not just the care of the patient. It changes everything because the system has to deal with costs, improve productivity, it’s owned by the hospital and they want to tell (doctors) to do more so they can bill more. There’s nothing ethically wrong with that, but it does conflict with the autonomy of doctors, who are used to calling their own shots.”

This article was also featured as part of California Healthline‘s “As Hospitals Acquire Doctors’ Practices, Physicians Worrying Quality Of Care Is Taking Back Seat To Productivity,” highlighting market trends and the impact of stress that experts say “physicians across the country are feeling as consolidation ramps up.”

Read the whole San Francisco Chronicle story here.

Take a look at the full Petris Center report in Health Affairs here.

This month Health Affairs published a new Petris report, “Consolidation Trends In California’s Health Care System: Impacts On ACA Premiums And Outpatient Visit Prices.” Since, the study has been referenced heavily in recent days in such places as the San Francisco Chronicle, Modern Healthcare, California Healthline, and the American Journal of Managed Care, the last of which provided clear and concise analysis of the report, describing Petris’s use of “hot spots” to assess heavily concentrated markets in California. The report itself focused on trends, by both vertical and horizontal integration, towards a heavily-concentrated health care market in California and their impact on prices.

The San Francisco Chronicle quotes Petris Center Director Richard Scheffler that practices of hospitals buying physician groups are not “illegal,” but that there is a “potential branding effect” where “people are willing to pay more, insurance companies like to have that in their plan, and they charge more for it… You don’t see it, but the cumulative effect is higher premiums and higher prices.” Read the whole story here.

Modern Healthcare continues citing Scheffler, who says that “the impact of these type of verticals is much more powerful when the hospital itself has a lot of market power and can jack up prices.” They also quote Scheffler in describing some of the challenges in solving these problems in that “the problem is that they can’t make a simple ruling because they don’t have any vertical integration guidelines or even a good theory of verticals.” Follow up on the whole article here.

California Healthline also weighs the difficulties in assessing these impacts. They reference Scheffler’s claim that although many many acquisitions of physician groups by hospitals are small-scale, adding them up leads to clear impacts on outpatient prices and Affordable Care Act premiums, preferring to call it “conglomerate care.” Read the whole story here.

 

 

The Petris Center’s research on health care market concentration was cited today in the Wall Street Journal article “Why Americans Spend So Much on Health Care—In 12 Charts.” As the article explains, one reason health care prices are rising is due to increasing concentration across health care markets, particularly hospital markets.

You can read the full article on the Wall Street Journal’s website here.

To learn more about our findings on market concentration research, seem our recent blog on the Commonwealth Fund’s website “Market Concentration Variation of Health Care Providers and Health Insurers in the United States”, or visit our market concentration project page here.

In an article discussing expanded care in a new San Francisco hospital, Petris Director Dr. Richard Scheffler was quoted regarding the general trend of hospitals in California towards maternity care in general. The article, titled “SF’s newest hospital to expand maternity care, end long-term nursing,” appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on July 29th, 2018.

According to Scheffler, “There’s big bucks in babies, hospitals know that,” Scheffler said. “I think this is a good thing, by the way. The more hospitals available in the Mission that can deliver babies, the better. … We get some form of increased competition. If it also happens to make money for them, this is America. This is the American health care system.”

He continues to state that moving subacute care out of hospitals is a “positive development,” and that “long-term stays in hospitals can increase the chances of contracting a serious illness such as pneumonia, which can be particularly dangerous for older patients.”

Dr. Scheffler concludes by claiming that the more services that can be performed out of the hospital, the “better off the patient is, and it’s good for our bank account. I’m in favor of moving things out.”

You can read the full SF Chronicle article that features his comments here.

Petris Center Research Director Dr. Daniel Arnold was quoted in the East Bay Express’ July 11th article, “Surviving in a Hospital Desert.” The article explores the impending closure of emergency services at Alta Bates in Berkeley and the consequences it has for communities in the East Bay, especially Richmond. In the article, Dr. Arnold discusses the role of California’s “managed care revolution” and the merging of hospitals and health systems in hospital’s financial woes, and ultimate closures.

You can read the full article on East Bay Express’s website here.

On June 12th, a federal district court approved the the blockbuster merger between AT&T and Time Warner, rebuffing the government’s effort to stop the $85.4 billion deal. This decision is widely expected to encourage similar mergers throughout the US economy. Commonwealth Fund President David Blumenthal, MD, spoke about the potential impacts of this merger on the health care industry in his blog “AT&T, Time Warner, and the Future of Health Care” on the Commonwealth Fund website. The blog cites Petris Center Director Dr. Richard Scheffler’s research on the potential impact of the proposed CVS-Aetna merger, writing that based on Dr. Scheffler’s analysis, “the merger of these Part D plans would significantly reduce competition, and thereby, could potentially increase the prices of drug coverage for Medicare patients.”

You can read the full blog post on the Commonwealth Fund site here.