By Jaime S. King
The time has come to meaningfully address the most significant driver of health care costs in the United States — the consolidation of provider market power.
Over the last 30 years, our health care markets have consolidated to the point that nearly 95% of metropolitan areas have highly concentrated hospital markets and nearly 80% have highly concentrated specialist physician markets. Market research has consistently found that increased consolidation leads to higher health care prices (sometimes as much as 40% more). Provider consolidation has also been associated with reductions in quality of care and wages for nurses.
In consolidated provider markets, insurance companies often must choose between paying dominant providers supracompetitive rates or exiting the market. Unfortunately, insurers have little incentive to push back against provider rate demands because they have the ability to pass those rate increases directly to employers and individuals, in the form of higher premiums. In turn, employers take premium increases out of employee wages, contributing to the growing disparity between health care price growth and employee wages. As a result, rising health care premiums mean that every year, consumers pay more, but receive less.
Dynamic health care antitrust enforcement is an idea whose time has finally come, but addressing the ills of consolidation in America’s health care system will require a comprehensive and multi-faceted approach. We have seen repeatedly how an entity with market power can respond quickly to negate the benefits of unilateral policy approaches, leading to an endless cycle of competition policy whack-a-mole. For instance, in the last decade, as health system merger and acquisition challenges became more successful, joint ventures and affiliations, especially with urgent care centers and private equity firms, became more frequent. Further, COVID-19 has exacerbated the threat of health care consolidation by leaving many independent hospitals and physician groups struggling financially and vulnerable to acquisition.
Fortunately, the Biden/Harris administration appears uniquely poised to implement a comprehensive initiative to address health care consolidation.
First and foremost, Biden has positioned key personnel with antitrust expertise, often with distinct knowledge of the health care industry, throughout his administration. For instance, the nomination of former California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who championed health care antitrust efforts in the state, as Secretary of Health and Human Services was an inspired choice and presents a unique opportunity to enhance competition through Medicare policy. Biden’s appointment of Tim Wu to the National Economic Council and nomination of Lina Khan to one of five seats on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also signal a strong commitment to strengthening antitrust enforcement writ large.
Second, the Biden administration should support recent efforts in Congress to address health care antitrust concerns. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) recently introduced a bill, the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act, which introduces sweeping reforms that would expand funding to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission, strengthen prohibitions against anticompetitive mergers by forbidding mergers that “create an appreciable risk of materially lessening competition,” shift the burden of proof to require merging entities to demonstrate that the merger will not harm competition, and take steps to prevent dominant firms from engaging in anticompetitive conduct.
Likewise, Senator Patty Murray’s (D-WA) Lower Health Care Costs Act of 2019 demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of how health care entities can use market power to obscure health care prices and negotiate anticompetitive contract terms, like all-or-nothing bargaining, gag clauses, and anti-steering provisions, and provided solid policy solutions to both issues. Providing support for bills like these will be essential to developing a comprehensive competition strategy.
Third, on September 17, 2020, the Federal Trade Commission announced much needed plans to revamp the Merger Retrospective program. The Biden administration should provide substantial funding and resources to reinvigorate this program.
Merger retrospectives, like Steven Tenn’s Sutter-Summit retrospective in 2008, have been pivotal and provided the FTC with much needed insight on how hospital mergers have leveraged the market power necessary to increase prices and harm consumer welfare. A newly revamped Merger Retrospective program holds great promise for antitrust enforcement in health care, especially if used to gain insight into whether and how vertical and cross-market health care mergers create anticompetitive harms. While a majority of consolidating transactions in health care include vertical or cross-market acquisitions, federal antitrust enforcement has been absent in this area.
Fourth, Congress and the Trump Administration have moved mountains to expand price transparency in health care, which will greatly facilitate research into the effects of different types of health care consolidation and contracting practices on prices. The Biden Administration should stand firm on requiring hospitals, insurers, and self-insured employers to report negotiated health care prices, and dedicate resources to analyze that data to determine both the drivers of health care prices and the effectiveness of public policy initiatives designed to control prices.
In addition, the Biden administration should promote transparency in health care consolidation by requiring all health care providers (hospitals, clinics, provider organizations, etc.) to report any material change in ownership to the Department of Health and Human Services and the FTC to allow the agencies to monitor consolidation patterns and look for stealth consolidation.
All winds seem to blow in the direction of the Biden Administration taking significant action to address rampant consolidation in health care and its harms. Yet, doing so requires funding and willpower. Funding for the FTC and DOJ has decreased in relative dollars since 2010, despite a near doubling in merger filings. The FTC and DOJ need increased funding to expand their ability to review and challenge anticompetitive transactions and practices by dominant health care entities, revamp and expand the scope of their Merger Retrospective Review program, and provide technical assistance to state antitrust enforcers. Furthermore, the FTC should be granted the authority and requisite funding to challenge anticompetitive behavior by non-profit organizations, as they have developed a significant expertise in health care provider markets.
Challenging the existing market dynamics in health care also demands the political will to take on some of the biggest industries in the nation (who make some of the largest lobbying contributions).
As we have seen in recent challenges to the practices of dominant health care providers, the battle will be hard-fought. Yet, the alternative — allowing the health care industry to continue to siphon off ever-increasing portions of the economy and wages — is unacceptable and irresponsible.
The Biden administration must make every attempt to improve the functioning of health care markets where possible, and implement price regulations in markets where competition has failed. Antitrust enforcement agencies must use the full force of their legal arsenal to restore competition in health care — and this may include breaking up large health systems that exploit their market power. For too long, the notion of “unscrambling the egg,” i.e., unwinding a previously consummated hospital merger, has been a non-starter in enforcement circles. To truly restore some form of competition in many health care markets, antitrust enforcers need to break up large systems, or at least have a credible threat of doing so.
The Biden administration has an opportunity to reinvigorate our health care markets, but only if it is willing to adopt a bold, determined, and comprehensive competition strategy.
Jaime S. King is the John and Marylyn Mayo Chair in Health Law and Professor of Law at the University of Auckland.
