
Mergers aren’t great; why do they keep getting approved?
Elsa Pearson is a senior policy analyst at Boston University School of Public Health. She tweets at @epearsonbusph. Health care mergers and acquisitions can have

Elsa Pearson is a senior policy analyst at Boston University School of Public Health. She tweets at @epearsonbusph. Health care mergers and acquisitions can have
Austin and I have a piece at the JAMA Forum (it’ll also come out in an upcoming issue of JAMA itself) explaining why health plans
A couple of weeks back, I wrote that “I don’t see a non-wonk constituency pushing for the intensity of antitrust enforcement that’s needed” to tackle
Ashish Jha has a new post on antitrust problems in the health-care industry: A robust literature on the benefits of competition in the health care marketplace shows
Aetna has denied any link between the Justice Department’s effort to block its merger with Humana and the company’s departure from the exchanges. Turns out
Imagine you want to buy ten pieces of the thousands of pieces of Halloween candy your two kids have collected, but you don’t care from
In December, Edith Ramirez, Chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, wrote a NEJM Perspective on antitrust enforcement in health care. Below are some quotes with my
This month, Health Affairs published four insightful articles about the growing challenge of provider concentration. As Paul Ginsburg and Gregory Pawlson frame the problem, [c]onsolidation within
The complexity of this undertaking highlights a fundamental enforcement reality. If it’s this hard for regulators to demonstrate why a patently worrisome acquisition should be
In association with the Baker Institute’s Oct 25th conference on health care reform, I have a post up that explains how some kinds of vertical integration
Sam Baker reports, House Democrats reintroduced a bill Tuesday that would revoke the health insurance industry’s exemption from antitrust laws — a liberal priority that
The Phoebe Putney decision is here. Prior TIE coverage of this case here. From the 11th Circuit opinion Dec 9: Memorial’s (and thus PPHS’s and PPMH’s)