{"id":9613,"date":"2025-11-14T19:30:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T19:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=9613"},"modified":"2025-11-14T19:30:00","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T19:30:00","slug":"will-trumps-team-slow-supersized-health-mergers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=9613","title":{"rendered":"Will Trump\u2019s Team Slow Supersized Health Mergers?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rising health care costs and the impending expiration of expanded Obamacare subsidies fueled the record-setting government shutdown<\/a> that ended this week.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another driver of escalating costs and prices playing out in a far broader, more impactful way: the rapid consolidation of insurers, hospital systems, doctors\u2019 groups, and pharmacies into behemoths, effectively giving them monopoly power.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Calling it \u201cmutually enforced monopolization,\u201d Barak Richman, the Alexander Hamilton professor of business law at George Washington University, told me: \u201cIt\u2019s not competition. It\u2019s more like collusion. They don\u2019t care about price.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In our market-based system, the price of each service is determined through a complex set of negotiations between an insurer and a provider. An insurer might agree to pay grossly inflated prices for a hospital system\u2019s labs to gain access to that system\u2019s must-have cancer center \u2013 and that cancer center might be in a town halfway across the country, where the insurer has a lot of clients.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The result is high prices: A patient who visits a hospital lab for a simple blood test could be stuck with $1,000 or more in deductibles, copays, and coinsurance.<\/p>\n

Studies show the escalating consolidation in health care is driving up prices, harming patient outcomes, and decreasing choice for people who need care. A recent study found that six years after hospitals acquired other hospitals, they had raised prices<\/a> by 12.9%, with hospitals that engaged in multiple acquisitions raising their prices by 16.3%.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At first, anti-competitive consolidation was easy for government regulators such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department to spot, because it involved hospitals acquiring other hospitals or providers in their own market area. But in recent years, new types of deals have been harder to police. Giant hospital systems now acquire providers far away, deals known as trans-market mergers. Insurers acquire doctors\u2019 practices and specialty pharmacies, often called vertical mergers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

President Joe Biden had made oversight of health care mergers a priority, issuing 2023 guidelines<\/a> that included these new types of consolidation. His FTC chair, Lina Khan, was vocal in her criticism of the trend.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Her successor under President Donald Trump has signaled a more moderate approach. But in an exclusive interview with KFF Health News, Daniel Guarnera, the director of the FTC\u2019s Bureau of Competition, said that the new leadership at the FTC and the Justice Department has endorsed the 2023 guidelines \u201cas a framing device\u201d for companies contemplating a merger.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What this means going forward remains unclear. Khan is now advising New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.<\/p>\n

KFF Health News<\/a> is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF\u2014an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF<\/a>.<\/p>\n

USE OUR CONTENT<\/h3>\n

This story can be republished for free (details<\/a>).<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rising health care costs and the impending expiration of expanded Obamacare subsidies fueled the record-setting government shutdown that ended this week.\u00a0 But there\u2019s another driver of escalating costs and prices playing out in a far broader, more impactful way: the rapid consolidation of insurers, hospital systems, doctors\u2019 groups, and pharmacies into behemoths, effectively giving them…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9614,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9613"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}