Health-care sector facing increased antitrust scrutiny

[alp227]

Source: The Washington Post

Amid growing concern about rising health-care costs, the Justice Department is stepping up efforts against hospitals and insurers that it suspects are illegally blocking competitors.

Department officials are not talking, but a recent settlement the government reached with a Texas hospital system has antitrust experts buzzing.

In the first case of its kind since 1999, the department sued United Regional Health System in Wichita Falls for allegedly giving health insurers strong incentives not to do business with rival hospitals. That practice allowed United Regional to keep its monopoly, according to the lawsuit, while also becoming one of the most expensive hospitals in the state.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/health_care_sector_facing_increased_antitrust_scrutiny/2011/04/01/AFIYc9fC_story.html

[azurnoir]

1. as well they should and hospitals should also be

looked at for some their practices such as

my MIL was hospitalized a couple of weeks ago for 5 days when she presented in the ER she was having chest or upper abdominal pain, now before she left the ER it was established that she was not having any cardiac problems and in fact the pain was most likely being caused a clogged bile duct, keep in mind this was established in the er but when she was brought to her room it was in the cardiac unit of hospital why because the hospital charges 3 to 4 times per day more for the room in cardiology than it does for a room in the general medical section the hospital, she was hospitalized for 5 days and had a stint place on her bile duct she had previously had her gallbladder removed

it is practices such as these that also work to drive up costs for everyone

[truedelphi]

3. Sorry to hear about your mil's plight.

Hope she is on her way to recovery.

The Hospitals and clinics and other sectors of the HC world are they only entities that can charge one price for one group of people, and another price for some one else.

So if you have a procedure and it is covered by insurance, it might only cost your insurer some five thousand bucks, but if you are an individual paying out of pocket, the same exact procedure is apt to cost more than twice that amount!

By law that is illegal, except for those in the health profession.

[azurnoir]

4. mil will be ok she's home and the pain she was experienceing

is much better thanks

[BlueIris]

2. I've always wondered why more in healthcare were scruitinized as monopolies. nt

[notesdev]

5. Here's the problem with health care prices

Just try to find out what the actual prices for things are. They will change according to who you are and how you are paying (the latter is specifically illegal in all other industries). There's a massive cost-shifting/gouging game that goes on where you can't even be sure what the price for anything should be since it is different everywhere with no consistent rhyme or reason why.

We need to revisit health care reform as the last go is a miserable failure. For starters, health care insurance companies ought not to exist other than to provide catastrophic coverage. Routine care should not be an insurable event, as that offends the very concept of insurance. Everybody who is not presently sick in some way ought not to be insured at all other than with a catastrophic policy, and pay cash against a published list of services and prices.

The key problem is that prices mean something. Prices are signals of supply and demand; they tell us when we need more people to do something, or fewer people to do something, or more of some product, or less of it - with a response time and effectiveness and precision that could never be matched by the most able technocrat imaginable. Over the years we have basically obliterated price signals on actual medical care, and as a result we have gotten to the point where regular healthy people can't get routine care at any fair price, they must either sign on to an obscenely-priced "insurance" policy or pay cash and get gouged. Same thing has happened with the drug sector as well.

[No Elephants]

6. Hospital mergers

"Hospital mergers have been increasing dramatically in the United States in recent years. There were 153 mergers throughout the entire decade of the 1980s, but 176 mergers in just the first seven years of the 1990s. Hospitals contend that mergers allow them to realize efficiency gains, reduce excess capacity, reduce transaction costs, and increase their ability to accept risk-based payment. Even so, mergers in highly concentrated markets could allow hospitals to increase their market power, thwart payers’ efforts to promote cost containment, and thus increase hospital prices.1 "

Much, much more at http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/20/4/150.full

I don't know why so many mergers happened in the early 90's. Did some law change?

[raccoon]

7. K&R. nt

[Wendy Wildfire]

8. Healthcare Prices are So High...Guess I have to Risk It

I completely think that the entire industry is corrupt! I can't believe how the prices have soared over the years and how hospitals and insurers can leave an ill or injured person without care! I am speaking from a position without insurance and at the moment cannot afford it. Even if I could afford it, the entire antitrust violations that Blue Cross Blue Shield have been involved in raised premiums, co-pays, and cost of medication so high...I would be completely broke! Guess I'll just have to risk it for now.