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Spending by private insurers tends to be higher when the hospital market is less competitive, a new study finds.<\/p>\nSpending by private insurers tends to be higher when the hospital market is less competitive, a new study finds.<\/p>\n
The study, published in the American Journal of Managed Care<\/a>, compared geographic patterns of Medicare spending, using the Dartmouth Atlas<\/a> data, with spending by big employers that cover their workers. The upshot was that the two didn\u0092t correlate. <\/p>\n The reason didn\u0092t seem to be that insurers (in this case, acting on behalf of big employers) are better than Medicare at saying no to paying for unneeded care since utilization pattenrs were somewhat parallel. Instead, the researchers suggest that when a small market has just one or a few big hospital systems, employers spend more than they do in large cities where there\u0092s more competition, an issue that doesn’t generally affect government health payers like Medicare.<\/p>\n \u0093We found that for commercial insurers, the higher-spending markets were those that were the least competitive on the provider side,\u0094 said Michael Chernew<\/a>, the lead author and a professor at Harvard Medical School. The finding, he argues, signals that as policymakers push for integrated systems bringing together all kinds of health care under one umbrella, they should keep antitrust concerns in mind. <\/p>\n This idea matches up with a couple of recent reports from state officials, as noted here<\/a> and here<\/a>. But it seems to cut against some previous research<\/a> arguing that when a market has a lot of hospitals, an \u0093arms race\u0094 mentality can drive up costs as they vie to buy the best new technology. <\/p>\n The new study\u0092s suggestion comes with a bucket of caveats. For one thing, there are other reasons why private insurers\u0092 payments wouldn\u0092t match up with Medicare\u0092s. Most obviously, the under-65 population has different medical needs than older folks. <\/p>\n Some hospital executives have long argued that they are forced to rely on payments from private insurers to make up for the money they lose on government-covered patients, another reason why the two types of payment wouldn’t correlate. The database used in the study also had fewer than 60 large companies, a limited sample that could create distortions.<\/p>\n Photo: iStockphoto<\/em><\/p>\n Spending by private insurers tends to be higher when the hospital market is less competitive, a new study finds. The study, published in the American Journal of Managed Care, compared geographic patterns of Medicare spending, using the Dartmouth Atlas data, with spending by big employers that cover their workers. The upshot was that the two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5482,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5482"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295686\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/img><\/a>
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