You don’t say.
Market share and prices tend to climb among hospitals that employ doctors but not for hospitals with looser contracts with independent physicians, according to newly published research. The findings, the authors say, suggest that integration itself does not produce the savings that many health system executives and policymakers promise from closer coordination between hospitals and doctors.
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Hospital prices, according to the study, increased 2% to 3% each time physician-employing hospitals’ market share increased by one standard-deviation. The results were drawn from an analysis of roughly 2 million hospital bills submitted to private insurers between 2001 and 2007. Overall spending on services at the hospitals that employed physicians grew, while the utilization of services at those hospitals didn’t change.
