Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the title of a recent paper by Gao, Kim, and Sevilir (2025). The authors examine 1218 hospital merger and acquisition (M&A) deals in the hospital industry between 2001 and 2008. The authors focus solely on M&A deals with for-profit entities as they argue that they want to examine whether private equity (PE) specifically…
A paper by Dillibe et al. (2025), examined primary data obtained from 555 US-based patients who reported switching providers between 2018 and 2022. To analyze these data, the authors used critical incident technique (CIT). CIT is implemented by asking participants to recall and describe specific events or behaviors that contributed to important outcomes (in this…
How does a hospital’s participation in a health plan’s Medicare Advantage (MA) provider network impact their commercial rates? Since many insurers offer both MA plans and commercial plans, there could be spillovers with respect to negotiating. How would MA network participation impact commercial rates? Marr et al. (2025) offers some hypotheses: On the one hand,…
That is the question posted by a recent paper by Li and Dor (2024). However, they define competition not just by the number of community health center (CHC) competitors or market concentration (e.g., Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, HHI) but also the quality of care provided by their competitors. A key methodological question is how this should be…
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) increased their required premerger reporting requirements for any healthcare providers such as hospitals. Healthcare Dive reports: Thursday’s update marks the first time the FTC has revised its Hart-Scott-Rodino Act premerger notification form in nearly 50 years.The law is intended to alert officials of companies’ intent to merge and…
This questions may be harder to answer than it may seem. While some physicians are fully independent, and others are full employees, other physicians can be affiliated with hospitals, without being hospital-employed. There are various approaches for measuring whether a physician is integrated within a hospital system: Basic TIN-based measure. The standard approach to identifying…
From the FTC’s press release out today: Today, the Federal Trade Commission brought action against the three largest prescription drug benefit managers (PBMs)—Caremark Rx, Express Scripts (ESI), and OptumRx—and their affiliated group purchasing organizations (GPOs) for engaging in anticompetitive and unfair rebating practices that have artificially inflated the list price of insulin drugs, impaired patients’…
As of 2007, about half of physicians had noncompete clauses (“noncompetes” for short) in their contracts. However, a recent FTC rule severely limits when they could be used. What specifically did the new FTC rule say about non-competes? Fuse Brown et al. (2024) provide a helpful summary. The final FTC rule declares all new noncompete clauses or…
This is a difficult question to answer. Consider the following world views: Decline-in-competition. Competition has declined because we observe increased market concentration, increased markets, decline in the labor share, and a lower rate of new-business formation at a macro level. Competition-in-action. If a few “superstar” firms in an industry grow by delivering greater value to…
The answer is ‘yes’ from a paper by Lin et al. (2024). Using 2009-2013 data from the Massachusetts All-Payer Claims Database, the authors measured physician–hospital integration within an accountable care organization (ACO) based on the proportion of primary care physicians (PCPs) in an ACO who billed for outpatient services with a place-of-service code indicating that…