Guess Who Pays the Price When Hospital Giants Hire Your Private Practitioner?
September 8, 2017
(Kaiser Health News) – As large hospital systems like Sutter Health, Stanford Medicine and UCSF Medical Center gobble up doctor practices, they gain market muscle that pushes costs upward. It’s a key reason why Northern California is now the most expensive place in the country to have a baby. A study published this week in Health Affairs found that large doctor practices, many owned by hospitals, exceed federal guidelines for market concentration in more than a fifth of the areas studied. But the mergers are typically far too small for federal antitrust authorities to notice.