Health Policy Trends
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The 2024 CHCF California Health Policy Survey (California Health Care Foundation)
Jen Joynt, Rebecca Catterson, Emily Alverez, Larry Bye, Vicki Pineau, and Lin Liu
The California Health Care Foundation released results from its fifth annual California Health Policy survey. Researchers from the California Health Care Foundation and NORC at the University of Chicago surveyed a representative sample to assess Californian’s views and experiences on a myriad of health care topics. This year’s survey yielded a number of key findings. Among them, researchers found that there is a high level of dissatisfaction with mental health care access, and that Californians, especially those with low incomes, were continuing to face burdens created by high health care costs and medical debt. Many Californians also reported being concerned about the effects of the weather and environmental factors on their health, and reported waiting for health insurance authorizations before they could receive doctor-approved care.
Healthcare System Mergers and Investments
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Certificates of Public Advantage: A Valuable Tool or Diminishing Allure? (Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice)
Abdur Rahman Amin
Antitrust in the healthcare sector has become a growing concern for the Biden administration, who have prioritized enforcement by hiring more antitrust lawyers and tasked the FTC and DOJ to investigate merger activity. In this new paper, the author providers a brief primer on key federal antitrust laws and regulations and assesses the current regulatory landscape of antitrust enforcement broadly, while making recommendations for better ways forward in the healthcare sector. Present merger and acquisition activity has created a system where the ten largest American health care systems now control over 25% of the national market. Against this landscape, the author engages in a discussion of the merits and criticisms of certificates of public advantage (COPAs), a type of antitrust exemption mechanism that lays at the heart of current antitrust controversies. While COPAs offer a method of state control over hospital mergers, they bear potential long-term costs including reduced quality and raised prices due to decreased competition, and thus, requires strong regulation and the addition of potential new approaches.
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Equity Investment in Physician Practices: What’s All This Brouhaha? (Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law)
Mark V. Pauly and Lawton Robert Burns
Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the U.S. healthcare system has experienced a boom in equity-based investments in physician practices – but this trend isn’t novel. In this new article in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, the authors assess the current investment wave against an initial wave of equity-led financings from the 1990s, specifically looking at the parallels and divergences between the two eras. While the 1990 market was more heavily influenced by public equity and physician practice management company (PPMC) investments and the current market is more private equity-centric, the authors discuss similarities in the eras including driving forces, acquisition dynamics, and models to achieve market penetration. The paper ends by delving deeper into private equity investments by asking how these investments may differ from the standard, determining whether they lack and confer competitive advantages, and assessing whether physician practice investments offer opportunities for “super-normal profits.” Overall, the authors determine that trends from the 1990s may be likely to repeat and call out the private equity threat as being “overblown.”
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Cross-Market Mergers with Common Customers: When (and Why) Do They Increase Negotiated Prices? (arXiv)
Enrique Ide
Cross-market mergers of supplies to intermediaries that bundle products for consumers have often been viewed as controversial. In this new paper, the author uses modeling to argue that two products can be complements for the consumer but substitutes for intermediaries and applies their findings to explain why cross-market hospital mergers raise healthcare prices. Cross-market hospital mergers involve hospitals in distinct geographies or diagnostic markets and have been contentious because they have been subject to limited antitrust enforcement despite findings showing that they have led to increases in insurance reimbursement rates with minimal increases in quality. Ultimately, the analysis finds that in the healthcare context, products can be complements for consumers but substitutes for intermediaries, helping explain why cross-market hospital mergers result in higher prices, and that reviewers should put a greater focus on mergers involving specialized providers.