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Over the last two decades, hospital systems and health insurers have acquired many types of providers, including physician practices, nursing home facilities, and home health agencies. Past research has shown that horizontal mergers of both hospitals and physician practices–when one hospital buys another or two physician practices merge–push up the price of care and lead to local job losses. Now, a new analysis of 276 hospital acquisitions of private practices is the first to show that vertical mergers also contribute to rising health care prices, and that these acquisitions increase both hospital and physician prices through anticompetitive mechanisms.

The $1.3 trillion U.S. hospital sector accounts for 6% of national GDP. Over the past 20 years, there have been well over 1,000 mergers among the nation's approximately 5,000 hospitals.

This money does not come from thin air; someone must pay for the gains that hospitals receive. So, who bears the cost of rising health care prices in the U.S. health care industry?

This paper by researchers at Yale, Stanford, and Dartmouth brings together data on the health spending of hundreds of millions of individuals covered by three main funders of health care in the U.S. – Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers – to study regional variation in health spending.

Hospital prices in the U.S. are rising faster than physician prices and inflation. Rising market concentration has been a key driver of rising hospital prices.

Hospital lawsuits over unpaid bills increased by 37 percent in Wisconsin from 2001 to 2018.

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Applied micro-economists, health economists, and health service researchers, for the most part, want their research to have impact, to inform public policy, and, ideally, to improve the lives of the public. Indeed, for many of us, it was the desire to create ideas and generate evidence that impact policy for the better that drove us to enter careers in academia in the first place. However, producing policy-relevant research and then having that research impact the policy process is hard and can be daunting, especially to younger academics. In many cases, the debates happening over public policy can seem detached and far removed from the questions addressed in academic articles. Likewise, the step between producing work and reaching policy makers can seem enormous and potentially out of reach.

We study where privately insured individuals receive planned MRI scans.

Researchers study the 2003 Medicare Modernization to understand the dynamics in politics that encourage increases in health care spending.

In the United States, hospitals and physicians independently negotiate contracts with insurers.

When physicians whom patients do not choose and cannot avoid can bill out of network for care delivered within in-network hospitals, it exposes patients to financial risk and undercuts the functioning of health care markets.

We examined the growth in health spending on people with employer-sponsored private insurance in the period 2007–14.

Evidence suggests that growth in providers’ prices drives growth in health care spending on the privately insured. However, existing work has not systematically differentiated between the growth rate of hospital prices and that of physician prices.

This paper uses data on 27.6 percent of individuals in the US with employer-sponsored insurance coverage to examine the variation in health spending for the privately insured and understand how provider prices influence spending variation across the US.

This paper examines the impact of a government programme which facilitated the entry of for-profit surgical centres to compete against incumbent National Health Service hospitals in England.

Although the Affordable Care Act has increased the number of Americans with health insurance, a 2014 survey found that 20% of insured people still have trouble paying medical bills.

We included 100% of Medicare Fee-for-Service patients ≥65 years of age who underwent MVS between 1999–2010 and survived to 1 year (N = 146,877). We used proportional hazards regression to analyze the post-MVS 1-year readmission rate in each year, mean hospital LOS (after index admission), and readmission rates by subgroups (age, sex, race).

Recent substantive reforms to the English National Health Service expanded patient choice and encouraged hospitals to compete within a market with fixed prices.

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Retrospective study of population-wide, patient level data using ordinary least squares regression to investigate the statistical relation between waiting times and patients’ socioeconomic status.