About Joanne Kenen
Contributing editor to Politico Magazine and former health care editor-at-large, Politico, Commonwealth Fund journalist in residence and assistant lecturer at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Hospitals across the country are merging – both with other hospitals and with other health care entities such as clinics and rehab facilities. (Those are sometimes called, respectively, horizontal and vertical integration.)
The question is whether the consolidation is creating more efficiency in the health care system, as hospitals generally argue, or whether it’s creating big monopolistic health care entities that will have more clout in negotiating with insurers and thus will lead to higher, not lower, prices.
Antitrust/ mergers and acquisitions is a topic health reporters often shy away from. But it’s important and we need to pay more attention. To help you, we just posted a tip sheet, “Getting the facts on hospital mergers and acquisitions,” based on an email-interview with Barak Richman of Duke Law School, one of the foremost experts on health care antitrust law. In addition, here are a few additional resources on the topic and some recent coverage about the issue nationally and locally.
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Contributing editor to Politico Magazine and former health care editor-at-large, Politico, Commonwealth Fund journalist in residence and assistant lecturer at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.