Ownership, Status, Market Concentration, and Hospital Pricing. Abstract,Executive Summary and Final Report

摘要

The traditional control of nonprofit hospitals by the communities they serve hasbeen offered as a justification for restraining antitrust enforcement of mergers involving nonprofit hospitals. Community control is arguably a constraint on a nonprofit hospital's inclination to exercise market power in the form of higher prices. However, community control is likely to be attenuated for hospitals that through merger or acquisition become members of hospital systems, particularly those that operate on a regional or multi-regional basis. In this paper the authors report findings from a study where they used a panel data set to examine empirically the relationship between market concentration and price growth for three types of nonprofit hospitals: independent (or stand alone) facility, member of local hospital system, and member of non-local hospital system.