Medicare for All and Industry Consolidation

The Health Care Blog

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Far more attention has been devoted to the ways in which industry consolidation has driven up health costs than to proposals on how to remedy the situation. But the introduction of Medicare for All and Medicare for More bills—however dim their short-term prospects are—has changed the terms of the debate. It is time to think about how we can eliminate the market power of health systems without causing harmful dislocations in health care and the economy.
Before we get to that, here are the main facts about consolidation: As a handful of health insurers have become dominant in many markets, health systems have done likewise in order to maintain or improve their negotiating positions.