It's not just my opinion.
How hospital monopolies are driving up the cost of your health care
More than a million times a year, a U.S. surgeon slices open a knee, strips out worn cartilage, caps the leg bones with metal and drops in a plastic spacer to allow the new joint to glide.
But while these knee-replacement procedures have become standard, the prices charged have not.
At Catawba Valley Medical Center in Hickory, North Carolina, for example, the cost of the procedure under a Blue Cross Blue Shield health plan this year was about $16,000, according to data from Serif Health, a San Francisco start-up that collects recently released data from hospitals and insurers. Little more than an hour's drive west, however,
at Mission Hospital in Asheville, the cost of the procedure under the same health plan was around $40,000, or more than double, the data showed.
:angry-cussing: I will go to Greenville before Asheville.
... The American Hospital Association, a trade group, has argued that hospital mergers can improve quality and reduce health care costs by creating "a fiscally sustainable environment." A Mission Hospital spokesperson said comparing hospitals' prices was unfair or misleading because their practices and constraints vary so much.
Liars :obscene-birdiered:
... For years, economists suspected that the run of mergers beginning in the late 1990s was a main driver of the rising costs of U.S. health care. From 2002 to 2020 alone, more than 1,000 hospital mergers unfolded in the United States.
:angry-banghead:
... Federal and state officials have wavered over when to intervene when hospitals are proposing to merge. Last summer, President Donald Trump revoked President Joe Biden's 2021 directive that urged federal agencies to challenge mergers that could harm consumers, reversing course from Biden's more aggressive enforcement of antitrust law....
Of course.
Asheville's dominant hospital ...
We are a poster child. :puke-left:
Birth of a monopoly
When Mission Health was formed by a merger in 1998, state officials recognized that Asheville's new dominant hospital system would have the power to raise prices and required Mission to sign an agreement to limit spending and profit margins.
Even with these restrictions, the hospital substantially hiked prices, according to economic research cited by the FTC. But Mission's prices were about to go up even more. In 2015, Mission Health lobbied the state legislature to drop the state restrictions, abandoning the profit limits.
"After 20 years of the hospital behaving itself, the state decided to terminate its oversight," said Mark Hall, a professor emeritus at Wake Forest University who has written an account of the hospital's merger history. Then, three years later, HCA, the largest hospital corporation in the country, bought Mission Health....
:sick: This was the plan all along.
"This put a prepackaged monopoly into the hands of the world's largest for-profit hospital corporation," Hall said.
Yup.
... A team at the think tank Rand, led by Christopher Whaley, now a Brown University health economist, uses commercial insurance records to compare average hospital prices across the U.S. relative to those paid by Medicare. According to the Rand figures, Mission Hospital in 2024 charged prices that were 334 percent of prices set by Medicare. Catawba Valley Medical Center charged 237 percent. The state benchmark for prices is 280 percent of Medicare, Rand figures showed.
"The prices we pay for healthcare vary tremendously and are uncorrelated to the value we receive," according to the Rand website.
For many in Asheville, the primary complaints about Mission Hospital focus on the quality of patient care. This is consistent with academic studies showing that the quality of care declines when hospitals have little competition.
... As more hospitals across the United States plan to merge, (NC Rep, D) Mayfield said, the experience in Asheville represents a cautionary tale.
"Unregulated monopolies have never gone well for the public," she said.
Ain't capitalism grand?
, but Pardee's not private. It used to be County owned and is now part of the UNC system. AFAIK staff are happy there. Otoh, we do have a local private for-profit outfit which is the subject of staff and patient complaints and even state sanctions - Mission/HCA.
Very very few organized nurses here.
