In 2011, James Robinson of the University of California reviewedhospital prices charged to commercial insurers for six common procedures: angioplasty, pacemaker insertion, knee replacement, hip replacement, lumbar fusion, and cervical fusion. He found that, on average, procedures cost 44 percent more in hospital markets with an above-average degree of consolidation.
It is problematic enough that regional hospital monopolies have the power to demand high prices. But on top of this, many hospitals engage in additional anticompetitive practices. Anna Wilde Mathews of the Wall Street Journal obtained secret contracts between insurers and hospitals revealing that these contracts often barred insurers from sending patients to “less-expensive or higher-quality health care providers.” Other hospitals precluded insurers from excluding some of the system’s hospitals from the insurer’s networks. Some contract provisions, including those from New York-Presbyterian Hospital and BJC HealthCare of St. Louis, prevented insurers from disclosing a hospital’s prices to patients.
https://freopp.org/improving-hospital-competition-a-key-to-affordable-medicine-343e9b5c70f
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