Hospital ownership of physician practices increased rapidly over the past decade, and by 2015 nearly 4 in 10 practices were owned by a hospital. Prior research has shown that physician integration with hospitals is associated with higher prices, but the latest evidence suggests it also affects which hospital a patient chooses to visit. A study […]
The 2016 Community Oncology Practice Impact Report documents a 121% increase in community cancer clinic closings and a 172% increase in consolidation into hospitals since 2008. In that period, 380 cancer treatment facilities have closed, and 609 community cancer practices have been acquired by or become affiliated with hospitals. Another 390 practices report that they […]
Hospital ownership of physician practices has increased by 86% in the last three years, according to a new report. The analysis, conducted by healthcare consulting firm Avalere Health and the not-for-profit Physicians Advocacy Institute, found that from 2012 to 2015, hospitals acquired 31,000 physician practices in the U.S. In 2012, about one in seven physician […]
Nearly 14.5 million Americans with a history of cancer were alive in 2014 and that number is projected to increase to 18.1 million in 2020. A number of factors will contribute to this increase, including the growth and aging of the U.S. population, an overall reduction in mortality, the earlier detection of cancer (lead timebefore […]
Recently, researchers and policy makers have demonstrated growing interest in differences in payments across sites of care for the same healthcare service, such as in a hospital outpatient department (HOPD) versus a physician office (PO). Our objective was to examine the price differential for individuals with employer-sponsored insurance by site of care for 7 commonly […]
Many policymakers (including state attorney general offices, Medicaid program directors, insurance commissioners) worry about the effects of medical provider consolidation on spending levels and trends. Medical provider consolidation’s impact on spending is an empirical question. On the one hand, consolidation may lead to the identification and dissemination of best practices and reductions in the use […]
Medicare beneficiaries can receive the same services in different outpatient settings, yet various providers in those settings can receive different payments for that care and beneficiaries can face different cost-sharing amounts. For example, a Medicare beneficiary could receive a colonoscopy in the hospital outpatient department (HOPD), an ambulatory surgical center (ASC) or a physician office. […]
Medicare expenditures for HOPD services have grown rapidly in recent years. Some policymakers have raised questions about whether this growth may be attributed to services that were typically performed in physician offices shifting to HOPDs. GAO was asked to examine trends in vertical consolidation and its effects on Medicare. This report examines, for years 2007 […]
IMPORTANCE Financial integration between physicians and hospitals may help health care provider organizations meet the challenges of new payment models but also may enhance the bargaining power of provider organizations, leading to higher prices and spending in commercial health care markets. OBJECTIVE To assess the association between recent increases in physician-hospital integration and changes in […]
In this paper, we estimate how hospital ownership of physicians’ practices affects their patients’ hospital choices. We match data on the hospital admissions of Medicare beneficiaries, including the identity of their admitting physician, with data on the identity of the owner of the admitting physician’s practice. We find that a hospital’s ownership of an admitting […]