Hospital Monopolies

See the following -

FTC Commissioner: Accountable Care Organizations Will Likely Lead to 'Higher Costs and Lower Quality Health Care'

Avik Roy | Forbes | November 21, 2011

In August, I wrote about how hospital monopolies are the biggest driver of health costs that nobody talks about. These powerful hospital chains know that insurers have no choice but to accept their jacked-up rates, and the cost of health insurance goes up whenever it suits their needs. Now, according to remarks by Federal Trade Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch, it turns out that accountable care organizations—one of Obamacare’s most touted policy gizmos—could make this problem far worse. Read More »

Goal of NYU-Continuum Hospital Mega-Merger: Raising Prices

Avik Roy | Forbes | June 8, 2012

On Wednesday, two big New York City hospital chains—New York University’s Langone Medical Center and Continuum Health Partners—announced that they were looking into merging into one mega-entity...There is only one reason why these two hospital chains are linking arms: to force insurers and patients to accept higher prices for their services. Read More »

Hospital Monopolies: The Biggest Driver of Health Costs That Nobody Talks About

Avik Roy | Forbes | August 22, 2011

The debate about health-care reform, on both the Left and the Right, revolves almost entirely around changing the way we pay for health care...I agree that changing the way we buy health care is important—I once wrote a 6,400-word magazine article on the subject—but there’s an entire other side to that equation that we completely ignore: changing the way we sell health care. Read More »

Surveys point to struggles in adoption of EHRs

Jeff Rowe | Government Health IT | June 25, 2012

Surveys are intended in part to give researchers a snapshot understanding of what is going on in a given part of society, or any single topic. Sometimes, though, it seems more productive to consider more than one survey at once in the name of getting at potentially broader implications.

Read More »