A question about your hospital consolidation points. Prevailing wisdom suggests that certain provisions of the ACA accelerated existing hospital consolidation trends. Or, perhaps it was easy for hospitals to retrospectively accuse the ACA of causing increased local market concentration and price gouging to private payers.
Obviously, an executive order causing hospitals to think twice before doing a merger is great. What do you think are the right policy approaches to manage the sky-high prices at hospitals that flows through to private insurance premiums? Does is have to be on a state-by-state basis (e.g., having other state AGs follow Becerra's path)? Do you think there are policy choices that should be made federally?
Similar to your points on drug pricing, it seems like the payor-provider fee-for-service scaffolding props up an almost intractable cycle of high prices and more high prices.
A question about your hospital consolidation points. Prevailing wisdom suggests that certain provisions of the ACA accelerated existing hospital consolidation trends. Or, perhaps it was easy for hospitals to retrospectively accuse the ACA of causing increased local market concentration and price gouging to private payers.
Obviously, an executive order causing hospitals to think twice before doing a merger is great. What do you think are the right policy approaches to manage the sky-high prices at hospitals that flows through to private insurance premiums? Does is have to be on a state-by-state basis (e.g., having other state AGs follow Becerra's path)? Do you think there are policy choices that should be made federally?
Similar to your points on drug pricing, it seems like the payor-provider fee-for-service scaffolding props up an almost intractable cycle of high prices and more high prices.