Apropos of the story below, see this comment from a piece by Paul Ginsburg in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The unchecked market power of some providers promises to become increasingly problematic for private payers. And if market approaches prove insufficient to solve a problem of this magnitude, regulatory intervention becomes more likely.
Regulatory intervention seems optimistic: 'unchecked market power' is not simply a strategy to capture consumers. It is primarily a means of shifting game parameters so that all likely future outcomes are in your favor, and that other players are competitively excluded from resource pools with the highest payoffs. 'Market approaches' are a poor rubric to evaluate healthcare enterprise where cost, quality, and even product (e.g. services, outcomes) are not transparent, and where little independence of player and rules exist. Elsewhere, they call it a 'company town'.
ReplyDelete