The NIHCM Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to transforming health care through evidence and collaboration. Read more about the work and the full press release here.
“New research by the University of California-Berkeley has identified ‘hot spots’ where private equity firms have quietly moved from having a small foothold to controlling more than two-thirds of the market for physician services such as anesthesiology and gastroenterology in 2021.”
“Private equity has done so much buying that it now dominates several specialized medical services, such as anesthesiology and gastroenterology, in a few metropolitan areas, according to new research made available to KHN by the Nicholas C. Petris Center at UC-Berkeley.”
Read the full article here.
Becker’s Hospital Review published an article detailing our study’s design and findings.
Read the full feature here.
“’During the past decade, over one-half of the 1,500 hospitals targeted for a merger were in another geographic market than the acquiring hospital or system,’ said Fulton. ‘But these mergers were rarely scrutinized by regulators because they were considered to be across markets.’
“However, large employers and insurers span these markets, potentially enabling these systems to exert market power across markets,” Fulton said.”
Read the full feature here.
“‘Generally speaking, cross-market hospital mergers get a pass by the FTC. But since more than half of the mergers from 2010 to 2019 were located in a different commuting zone than the acquirer, we can’t ignore it,’ said Brent Fulton, lead author of the study and an associate research professor of health economics and policy at University of California, Berkeley.”
Read the full article here.
Health economic researchers from the University of California, Berkeley on Thursday shared their analysis of Indiana’s healthcare markets — determining that the concentration of insurers and hospitals has contributed to higher costs over the last decade. Prices at non-merged hospitals, for instance, remained relatively flat over the time period they analyzed, while those entities that had been involved in a merger or acquisition had prices increase by roughly 50%.
The presentation was at a joint meeting between interim committees on finance and public health, and dozens of policymakers reviewed the state-commissioned studies. Read about it here.
Richard Scheffler was one of the signers of a letter sent to Secretary Becerra and Administrator Brooks-Lasure expressing support for national transparency in the long-term care system.
Richard Scheffler, Brent Fulton, and Dan Arnold, all key Petris researchers, have signed a brief appealing to the Court’s decision in the recent Sutter case. It demonstrates the damage done to healthcare markets when anticompetitive practices, such as consolidation, take place.
“‘While the paper provides solid evidence that COPAs can raise prices, lower the quality of care, and create access problems, the FTC can’t do much more than recommend that states stop using them,’ said Richard Scheffler, a health economist and policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley.”
Read the full article here.
“‘This is a very important study and the data it presents is going to be hugely important in the healthcare debate about competition among hospitals and price transparency,’ said Richard Scheffler, a health economics and policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley.”
Read the full article here.
