Hospital mergers led to higher prices

Continuing with last week's theme, KFF Health News published another story about how shopping around for health care (this time with a driving radius of a few hours) can yield dramatic price differences (e.g. $16,000 vs $40,000). While both prices exceed the out-of-pocket maximum that insured patients would generally need to pay, the health insurance plans would pay different amounts, meaning that patients who visit the more expensive providers will contribute to higher health insurance premiums. This article specifically noted that mergers of health systems have contributed to higher prices by forming monopolies ("anyone who pays for health insurance pays a price for hospital monopolies, as insurers boost premiums as medical costs rise").

While the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was formed to protect against anti-competitive mergers, the article cites a paper that found that "the FTC intervened in only about 1% of such cases from 2002 to 2020 to stop a hospital merger." In addition to the suspected higher prices, research has sadly found "that the quality of care declines when hospitals have little competition."