Every week I’ve been including a short tidbits part to the THCB Reader, our weekly e-newsletter that summarizes the very best of THCB that week (Sign up here!). Then I had the brainwave so as to add them to the weblog. They’re brief and normally not too candy! –Matthew Holt
For at this time’s well being care tidbits, there’s an old chestnut that I can’t appear to steer clear of. I used to be triggered by three articles this week. Merril Goozner on GoozNews seemed on the hospital building boom. In the meantime perennial favourite Sutter Well being and its price-making capability got here up in a report exhibiting that 11 of the 19 most expensive hospital markets were in N. Cal where it’s dominant. Lastly the Gist e-newsletter identified that the majority the precise earnings of the massive well being techniques got here from their investing activities rather than their operations.
None of that is any nice shock. Over the previous three many years, the massive hospital techniques have grow to be extra concentrated of their markets. They’ve acquired smaller group hospitals and, extra importantly, feeder techniques of main care docs. In the meantime they’ve lower offers with and purchased specialty practices. For greater than twenty years now, owned-physicians have been the loss chief and hospitals have made cash on their excessive value inpatient providers, and more and more on what was once inpatient providers which at the moment are delivered in outpatient settings at basically inpatient charges. Costs, although, haven’t fallen – as the HCCI report shows.
The general value of care, now increasingly more delivered in these more and more oligopolistic well being techniques, continues to extend. Consequently so do total insurance coverage premiums, prices for self insured employers and staff, and out of pocket prices. And as a by-product, the reserves of these well being techniques, invested like and by hedge funds, are rising–enabling them to purchase extra feeder techniques.
Wendell Potter, former Cigna PR man and now total heath insurer critic, wrote a bit this week on how much bigger and more concentrated the health plans have become in the last decade. However the larger story is the expansion of hospital techniques, and their value and clout. Dave Chase likes to say that America has gone to war for less than what hospitals have done to the American economy. That could be a tad hyperbolic, however nobody would rationally design a well being care atmosphere the place non-profit hospitals are getting larger and richer, and don’t appear to have the ability to restrain any facet of their development.
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