By: Robert A. Berenson, M.D.   The lead story in the October 5, 2021 issue of the Washington Post regarding hospital finances during the coronavirus pandemic highlighted an American Hospital Association spokesperson’s recent assertion that “the delta variant has wreaked havoc on hospitals and health systems.” The article explained that staff shortages were raising staff salaries substantially, leading to “excess labor costs,” which, in combination with a new round of deferred elective procedures during the most recent surge of the delta variant, has reduced hospital profit margins and cash flow. …

By: Gregory Curfman, MD   On October 20, 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice joined by 11 state attorneys general filed a stunning civil antitrust lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against Google.[1] What will this antitrust case mean for health information, and what other questions are health policy makers asking about Google’s control of health information? The complaint in this high-profile case is that Google engages in anticompetitive practices in the two principal components of its business, general internet search and advertising related …

Healthcare providers are increasingly realizing the potential that telemedicine has to offer. Not only has it been the most talked-about healthcare solution lately, but waivers from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have enabled providers to begin implementing telemedicine tools themselves, resulting in skyrocketing adoption over the past year. Now, these waivers might be temporary for the time being, but with telehealth adoption at an all-time high, federal and state governments are under increasing pressure to make these emergency measures permanent.  Congress is under particular pressure to pass …

Recent trends: In the early 2000s, it appeared that the only healthcare establishments looking to merge were those with no other alternative; it was a case of merge or go out of business. Well, the situation has changed. Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) activity has been gradually increasing over the past decade or so, and a spike was seen in 2017, with the number of transactions (115 in 2017 compared to 2016’s 102) being the highest since the financial firm, Kaufman Hall, began monitoring it in the year 2000. Even more …

By Guest Blogger: Professor Thomas L. Greaney Federal antitrust oversight of hospital consolidation has come upon hard times. Over the last two months the Federal Trade Commission suffered three notable setbacks in challenges to hospital mergers. Federal district courts in Pennsylvania and Illinois have refused to issue preliminary injunctions in cases in which the agency claimed the combined market shares of the merging parties were in excess of 64 and 50 percent respectively. Both cases turned largely on disputes over defining the always-elusive “relevant geographic market” in which merging hospitals compete. …

By Guest Blogger: Don Quigley, Retired Chief Legal Officer for an East Coast Health System Introduction Corporate Compliance, like Saskatchewan, has a familiar ring to directors or trustees of health care organizations, but few have personal experience or understanding of its attributes or relevance. That status seems likely to change in 2016 based upon the events of 2015, forecasting increased self-policing, personal accountability for leaders, and physician arrangements as the top risk areas. The government is seeking major, if not radical, changes in compliance oversight. When health care providers commit …

By Guest Blogger: Steven Brodsky Overview The trend toward increasing concentration in hospital markets has spiked in recent years.[1] That trend consists largely of transactions in which each of the combining hospitals is, by virtue of its location, services or reputation, uniquely able to fill a slot health plans need to fill in their provider networks. (For example, there is just one hospital on the east side of town and just one on the west side|health plans need each of them – and they combine to form a multiple-hospital “health …

By Guest Blogger: Amanda Goltz, MPA, Industry Consultant In the avalanche of media coverage, conference sessions, and social media posts around why the $2.7 trillion healthcare industry is one of the slowest to adopt widespread innovation, there’s plenty about the barriers to change, but not a lot of what truly drives the few widespread changes that actually have happened. We understand that the third party payer system distorts business models, the practice of medicine is an art as much as a science, fee for service rewards process, not outcomes, and that …

By Guest Blogger: Don Quigley, Retired Chief Legal Officer for an East Coast Health System The Source Blog recently noted the SEC action in August finally adopting the executive compensation disclosure rule mandated by the Dodd-Frank reform statute enacted five years earlier. The disclosure rule requires most public companies to disclose to shareholders the total compensation of their CEOs along with a ratio of such compensation to the median employee compensation. The Source questioned whether the effect of the rule will reduce the incidence of exorbitant CEO pay packages and have …

By Guest Blogger: Erin C. Fuse Brown, JD, MPH We are pleased to publish another excellent post by Professor Fuse Brown, originally published here by the Center for Law, Health & Society! The post: Last month, Slate columnist Reihan Salam wrote a provocative article about outrageous hospital prices that are driven, according to Salam, by greed, avarice, and market power. Salam gets a few things dead right, namely his diagnosis that we have a massive hospital pricing problem that is bleeding us dry and that the problem is largely caused by growing hospital market power. However, he misses the …