Tag Archives: Higher Prices

House Subcommittee Takes Dim View of Healthcare Consolidation

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https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/strategy/house-subcommittee-takes-dim-view-healthcare-consolidation

Lawmakers and witnesses alike cited the ill-effects of hospital mergers and acquisitions in a long list of industry behavior they find troubling.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

An economics and health policy professor from Carnegie Mellon suggested lawmakers should give the FTC more power to review nonprofit mergers.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle expressed dissatisfaction with the healthcare industry’s consolidation trend and voiced support for legislative action.

A hearing of the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee would not have been a comfortable place Thursday for any healthcare executive touting the benefits of a planned merger or acquisition.

Lawmakers and witnesses took turns criticizing rampant consolidation among hospitals and other healthcare companies. While the public is often told these deals will lead to improved efficiency and higher quality care, those purported benefits frequently fail to materialize, they said.

Since the hearing grouped payer and provider consolidation with anticompetitive concerns about the pharmaceutical industry—an area that both major parties have expressed interest in addressing through congressional action—the discussion could signal how lawmakers will approach any legislation to address the problems they perceive.

Rep. Doug Collins, a Republican from Georgia and the committee’s ranking member, said hospital consolidation has had an especially detrimental impact on rural communities in his state.

“These communities often already have few options for quality care, so as hospital consolidation has increased over the past 10 years, rural communities like my own have been hurt the most,” Collins said.

“At times, these mergers and acquisitions can help rural communities by keeping facilities open, but often they result in full or partial closures and shifting patients from nearby facilities to those hours away,” he added.

Some problems caused by consolidation, such as increased travel times for emergency services, can “literally mean the difference in life and death,” Collins said.

Jerry Nadler, a Democrat from New York and the committee’s chairman, said there’s no question that the recent spate of mergers has contributed to the industry’s problems.

“It is well documented that hospital mergers can lead to higher prices and lower quality of care,” Nadler said.

Martin Gaynor, PhD, an economics and health policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a founder of the Health Care Cost Institute, said in his testimony that there have been nearly 1,600 hospital mergers in the past 20 years, leading most regions to be dominated by one large health system apiece.

“This massive consolidation in healthcare has not delivered for Americans. It has not given us better care or enhanced efficiency,” Gaynor said. “On the contrary, extensive research evidence shows us that consolidation between close competitors results in higher prices, and patient quality of care suffers for lack of competition.”

Since hospitals that have fewer competitors can better negotiate favorable payment terms, this consolidated landscape “poses a serious challenge for payment reform,” he added.

“Our healthcare system is based on markets. That system is only going to work as well as the markets that underpin it,” Gaynor said. “Unfortunately, these markets do not function as well as they could or should.”

Gaynor recommended several possible policy changes, including an end to policies that make it harder for new competitors to enter a market and compete and an expanded authority for the Federal Trade Commission to review potentially anticompetitive conduct by nonprofit entities. He also said lawmakers should consider imposing FTC reporting requirements for even small transactions to enhance the tracking capabilities of enforcement agencies.

To support his claims, in his written testimony, Gaynor pointed to research he completed with Farzad Mostashari of Aledade Inc. and Paul B. Ginsburg of The Brookings Institution.

 

 

 

 

NC hospital system tries another megamerger

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Atrium Health struck out a year ago when it attempted to merge with in-state rival UNC Health Care, Bob reports. Now, the hospital system has inked a new deal to combine with Wake Forest Baptist Health, which is 90 minutes away from its headquarters.

Why it matters: Research overwhelmingly shows these kinds of regional hospital mergers lead to higher health care prices (and, consequently, premiums) because providers gain negotiating leverage and make it harder for health insurers to exclude them from networks.

Between the lines: The primary hook that Atrium and Wake Forest are selling is that they would build a new medical school in Charlotte. Because who could be against more doctors and research?

  • The organizations didn’t mention how, or if, they would try to keep costs and prices down.
  • The combined system would have almost $10 billion of revenue, which is roughly the size of Boston Scientific.

 

When Hospitals Merge to Save Money, Patients Often Pay More

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The nation’s hospitals have been merging at a rapid pace for a decade, forming powerful organizations that influence nearly every health care decision consumers make.

The hospitals have argued that consolidation benefits consumers with cheaper prices from coordinated services and other savings.

But an analysis conducted for The New York Times shows the opposite to be true in many cases. The mergers have essentially banished competition and raised prices for hospital admissions in most cases, according to an examination of 25 metropolitan areas with the highest rate of consolidation from 2010 through 2013, a peak period for mergers.

The analysis showed that the price of an average hospital stay soared, with prices in most areas going up between 11 percent and 54 percent in the years afterward, according to researchers from the Nicholas C. Petris Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

During the Obama years, the mergers received nearly universal approval from antitrust agencies, with the Federal Trade Commission moving to block only a small fraction of deals. State officials generally looked the other way.

President Trump issued an executive order last year calling for more competition, saying his administration would focus on “limiting excessive consolidation throughout the health care system.” In September, Congress asked the Medicare advisory board to study the trend.

But not only have big consolidations continued, the behemoths have further cemented their reach in some regions of the country by gobbling up major doctors’ and surgeons’ practices.

“You have to watch for these systems throwing their weight around,” said Xavier Becerra, the California attorney general whose office has sued Sutter Health, a sprawling system in the northern part of the state. “We are looking for cases where consolidation does nothing for efficiency and leads to distortions of the market.”

Ted Doolittle, who heads Connecticut’s Office of the Healthcare Advocate, has fielded angry complaints from residents, but he sees few options available to officials. “A lot of this is too little and too late,” he said.

The latest giant hospital consolidations continue to stir concerns. Dignity Health and Catholic Health Initiatives, two large chains, are expected to become one of the nation’s largest groups — with 139 hospitals in 28 states — by the end of the year. And two of Texas’ biggest systems, Baylor Scott & White Health and Memorial Hermann Health System, recently announced plans to combine.

The New Haven area has witnessed the most significant decline in competition. Yale New Haven Health, one of the largest hospital groups in Connecticut, took over the only competing hospital in the city and has also aggressively expanded along the state’s coast. The group recently added another hospital to its collection, merging Milford with its Bridgeport location.

Although the price of a hospital admission in the New Haven-Milford area was already three times higher than in other parts of the state, prices surged by 25 percent from 2012 to 2014, compared with 7 percent elsewhere in the state, according to the Petris Center.

In the national analysis, a third of the metropolitan areas experienced increases in the cost of hospital stays of at least 25 percent from 2012 to 2014, from roughly $12,000 to at least $15,000.

Prices rise even more steeply when these large hospital systems buy doctors’ groups, according to Richard Scheffler, director of the Petris Center.

Thousands of Connecticut residents were stranded without a local hospital last year when another big hospital group, Hartford HealthCare, battled the state’s biggest health insurer over how much it would charge for patient care.

Its six hospitals are clustered around the state capital and are the only resort for residents in broad swaths of the eastern part of the state. This month, it announced plans to add a seventh hospital to its network.

“These systems are empire-building, there’s no question,” said Jill Zorn, a senior policy officer for the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, which seeks to improve access for residents. “But to whose benefit?”

Numerous studies by economists and others have underscored how hospital consolidation is driving up the cost of medical care. “Within the academic community, there is near unanimity,” said Zack Cooper, a health economist at Yale University who is among a group of researchers that has looked at how dominant hospitals affect prices.

The emergence of a one-hospital town is inevitable in many places, and the Parkersburg, W.Va., area is no exception. St. Joseph’s merged with neighboring Camden-Clark Memorial in 2011, and then they were consumed by what is now the state’s largest health system.

Residents can get most care locally but they go to Morgantown, where the academic medical center is situated, for complex conditions. “We’ve elevated the level of care,” Mr. Wright said.

But private insurers are paying more. In the Parkersburg-Vienna area, the overall price of a hospital stay increased 54 percent from 2012 to 2014, after the mergers. That is compared with 10 percent elsewhere in the state, according to the Petris Center.

Large systems “get paid better by some of the insurers,” Mr. Wright said.

Flailing hospitals often have little choice but to be acquired or go out of business, and a larger system can offer badly needed capital and management skills. “They can fix a hospital and benefit the community,” said Torrey McClary, a lawyer who specializes in mergers at King & Spalding.

When Yale New Haven Health took over the Hospital of Saint Raphael, a Catholic hospital six blocks away from its New Haven location, Saint Raphael was in danger of going under. Over the last six years, the system has invested more than $200 million in capital improvements at Saint Raphael, said its president Richard D’Aquila, including modernizing “everything behind the walls.”

Because it converted Saint Raphael into what is essentially a second 555-bed campus for its academic medical center, Yale New Haven Health defends the higher rates it charges private insurers as appropriate for a top-tier medical institution. Its community hospitals negotiate prices individually with insurers.

Systems also say they are trying to improve the care for smaller communities. “We’re actively trying to move care toward places that are accessible,” Hartford’s chief executive, Elliot Joseph, said.

But patients rarely reap the rewards of lower insurance premiums or out-of-pocket expenses when mergers occur.

Hartford executives talk about reducing the total cost of care in the same breath that they discuss the need to charge insurers more. “The math for us is how we move the care out of the hospitals while maintaining our financial stability,” Mr. Joseph said.

To defend higher rates, many hospitals cite low reimbursements from government sources, particularly Medicaid, and highlight their role as a safety net. “We’re left with no choice,” Mr. D’Aquila said.

Others, like Hartford, negotiate prices as a single entity, forcing health insurers to include all of their hospitals in a network or risk losing access in areas where there are no alternatives.

Hartford “has taken over so many hospitals and practices that, with the Anthem dispute, we felt we had no choices at all,” Sharry Goldman, a Storrs, Conn., resident, told state lawmakers. Although Hartford and Anthem Blue Cross, the insurer, eventually reached an agreement, Connecticut passed a law this year requiring hospitals and insurers to extend previous contracts for two months to protect consumers when the parties are at an impasse.

While patients may pay more for a well-known brand, like Yale, it is not clear that the higher price tags lead to better care, said Francois de Brantes, a health care executive who once worked at General Electric, which is headquartered in the state.

Since the merger, Yale New Haven has defended the higher rates it charges private insurers as appropriate for a top-tier medical institution.CreditChristopher Capozziello for The New York Times

“We have more lower-rated hospitals in Connecticut than in other New England states,” he said, pointing to an analysis he did at the time of the Anthem-Hartford dispute.

In the Albany, Ga., area, where the Berkeley researchers found a rare decline in hospital prices, the Federal Trade Commission had unsuccessfully attempted to block HCA, the for-profit hospital chain, from selling its hospital to its only local competitor in 2011. But the merger took place, and the F.T.C. reached a settlement with the parties involved.

While Berkeley researchers found area prices dropped, another study by two former F.T.C. employees, Christopher Garmon and Laura Kmitch, found that certain hospital quality measures declined. The merger “highlights the problems that can occur when competition is reduced,” the authors said.

The hospital group, Phoebe Putney Health System, dismissed the findings. “Phoebe has made great strides in enhancing the quality of health care available to the people of southwest Georgia,” Dawn Benson, Phoebe’s general counsel, said in a statement.

To foster competition, Lee County is planning a new 60-bed hospital within the Albany area.

In some cases, state regulators have opposed actions they consider illegal and anti-competitive. In Washington, state officials accused CHI Franciscan Health, based in Tacoma, of using its ties to two doctors’ practices to raise prices and decrease competition on the Kitsap Peninsula, according to a lawsuit filed last year.

The regulators argue that CHI wanted to wield its newfound clout by shifting some operations and imaging from less expensive outpatient settings to hospitals where they could charge more.

“I am all for taking advantage of hospital-based pricing, if we think it is doable in the market and the market can support it,” a CHI executive is quoted as saying in the lawsuit. “It would be great to drop a couple of million more to our bottom line.”

CHI Franciscan said the attorney general’s allegations were “misguided and unfounded.”

In California, Mr. Becerra, the state attorney general, brought a lawsuit against Sutter in March, claiming that its actions led to significantly higher prices in Northern California.

Sutter says it adopted methods encouraged by the federal health care law, by combining hospital services with care delivered outside the hospital to better meet patients’ needs.

But Mr. de Brantes, the health care executive in Connecticut, and others wonder why many mergers were allowed in the first place. “The puzzling part for many of us in the state is why anyone would allow these oligopolies to form,” he said.

 

 

 

Massachusetts officials attach stiff conditions to Beth Israel-Lahey merger

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https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/massachusetts-officials-attach-stiff-conditions-to-beth-israel-lahey-merger/539515/

Dive Brief:

  • Massachusetts public health officials have set tough new conditions for the proposed merger of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Lahey Health that will require the parties to demonstrate they’re holding down costs while ensuring access to low-income patients, The Boston Globe reports.
  • The conditions, laid out at a Wednesday meeting of the state’s Public Health Council, include yearly reporting of how the hospitals will apply savings from the merger to enhance care quality and access to services. If savings surpass the state’s 3.1% benchmark for controlling healthcare costs, the new system will have to put more money back into services and community hospitals and clinics.
  • The conditions also require the system, within six months, to develop a plan to increase services to Medicaid patients and, within two years, ensure full participation by Beth Israel-Lahey physicians in the state Medicaid program.

Dive Insight:

The conditions follow a Health Policy Commission report that warned the merger could result in a $128.4 million to $170.8 million increase in healthcare spending for inpatient, outpatient and adult primary care services and up to $59.7 million for specialty physician services.

The commission concluded that while the merger could lead to improvements in quality and efficiencies, the companies hadn’t explained how that would happen. The new conditions call for a second report in five years to assess the merger’s impact on healthcare costs and services in the state.

BIDMC CEO Kevin Tabb called the commission’s conditions “strict,” but said they won’t discourage the planned merger. “While the conditions are unprecedented, we are eager to move forward together as Beth Israel Lahey Health,” he told Healthcare Dive via email. “The status quo in this market is unacceptable, and it’s time to do something different.”

As mergers and acquisitions continue in healthcare, potential problems could lead to more stringent conditions. Research has shown, for example, that horizontal mergers can drive up costs. Once completed, Beth Israel-Lahey Health would rival Partners HealthCare System in terms of market share in Massachusetts. The new company could use its increased bargaining power to raise prices for commercial payers, increasing healthcare spending.

A recent National Bureau of Economic Research analysis also played down the extent to which hospital mergers increase efficiencies. According to NBER, acquired hospitals save just 1.5% of total costs following a merger — or an average of $176,000 a year.

And a recent University of California-Berkeley study of health system consolidation in the state found that highly concentrated markets led to higher hospital and physician service fees, as well as higher Affordable Care Act premiums, especially in northern California.

 

 

AT&T, Time Warner, and the Future of Health Care

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https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2018/att-time-warner-and-future-health-care?omnicid=EALERT%25%25jobid%25%25&mid=%25%25emailaddr%25%25

AT&T Time Warner Merger

Policymakers and private actors should not interpret a federal court’s AT&T and Time Warner ruling as an unconditional green light for vertical integration in health care.

The need for change in the U.S. health care system is obvious, but whether vertical integration is the change we need remains to be determined.

The recent federal district court ruling allowing the merger of AT&T and Time Warner — a case of so-called vertical integration — will likely encourage similar unions throughout the U.S. economy, including in health care. Nevertheless, a close look at the court’s decision, and at the wide variety of vertical health care mergers under way, suggests that policymakers and private actors should not interpret the court’s ruling as an unconditional green light for vertical integration in health care, or any other sector.

Vertical integration typically involves the combination of entities operating on different parts of a supply chain in the production of a particular product. Manufacturers of tires, for example, are part of the supply chain that results in a finished automobile. Similarly, ambulatory physician services are sometimes seen as an input on the supply chain of more advanced hospital services. The acquisition of physician practices by hospitals is often characterized as vertical integration.

Some antitrust experts question whether the analogy between manufactured products and health care delivery is accurate. Independent physicians, for example, often work within hospitals and help to produce their “products.” Nevertheless, there are clear differences between mergers across the same types of health care organizations, like hospitals, and those between different types of providers, like physicians and hospitals.

The AT&T/Time Warner case was the first time in 40 years that the government has taken a proposed vertical integration to court, and many commentators have noted that antitrust theory with respect to vertical integration could use some updating. In the meantime, however, Judge Richard Leon’s 172-page opinion seems to have relied on traditional antitrust considerations: would the merger increase or decrease competition, and thereby increase or decrease consumer welfare? His ruling rested heavily on what he viewed as the government’s failure to supply evidence that the merger would have adverse effects. In other words, if the government had produced more convincing data, the ruling could have gone the other way.

Judge Leon’s ruling may be appealed and, if so, may not stand. But if it does, what are its implications for vertical integration in health care? Simply put, the facts matter. And unfortunately, the facts about vertical integration in health care are obscure, and likely to vary enormously according to the details of the merger and from market to market.

Evidence on the effects of horizontal health care mergers has grown considerably in recent years, and generally shows that they increase prices. But studies of vertical health care mergers are much less common. Perhaps the most relevant experience concerns long-standing integrated health systems, such as Kaiser Permanente, Intermountain, Geisinger, and a handful of similar organizations.

Widely regarded as industry leaders in quality and efficiency, these systems seem to demonstrate the benefits of vertical integration: they are able to coordinate services across different types of providers, and, when incentives encourage it, they can easily substitute less expensive services (e.g., ambulatory care) for more expensive ones (e.g., hospital care). However, whether the experiences of these integrated systems are generalizable to the current flock of mergers is unclear. Each of these venerable organizations has a unique history and culture that have shaped its performance over decades.

Studies of vertical integration will have to take into account the type of merger under consideration. The most common type of vertical integration seems to be the acquisition of physician groups — both primary care and specialty — by hospitals. Between 2012 and 2016, the number of hospital-employed U.S. physicians increased from 95,000 to 155,000.

But health care is witnessing a variety of other types of vertical integration. Insurers are buying physician groups, as in the case of UnitedHealth Group’s acquisition of parts of DaVita’s physician network. Drug store chains are buying insurers, as in the case of CVS’s purchase of Aetna. And integrated health systems like Partners HealthCare are proposing to buy insurers like Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.

The effects of these varied mergers will depend on the types of services being combined and the markets affected. From both a societal and legal standpoint, the facts matter.

For example, it turns out that the CVS-Aetna merger includes an important horizontal union between Part D health plans owned independently by CVS and Aetna. Part D health plans provide drug coverage to Medicare beneficiaries. In recent testimony before the California Department of Insurance, economist Richard Scheffler showed that in a number of markets, the merger of these Part D plans would significantly reduce competition, and thereby, could potentially increase the prices of drug coverage for Medicare patients. Fear of consolidation among Part D plans has caused the American Medical Association to oppose CVS’s acquisition of Aetna.

Adding to the uncertainty surrounding these questions is the unique nature of the health market, in which governments are the largest purchasers and consumers often don’t know the prices or value of the products they buy. Traditional competition in local markets sometimes results in radically increasing prices and costs, as providers pile on new technologies and facilities and compete for star physicians in an effort to attract customers. And many parts of health care already have a high degree of consolidation that limits price competition.  The result is a level of dysfunction that has created an almost universal cry for radical disruption of the status quo.

Health care is a conundrum on many levels, and how and whether to regulate vertical integration among its varied components may turn out to be another one. The need for change is obvious. Whether vertical integration is the change we need, and how the courts will treat it, remain to be determined.

 

Healthcare Triage: Why Does the U.S. Spend So Much on Healthcare? High, High Prices.

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Healthcare Triage: Why Does the U.S. Spend So Much on Healthcare? High, High Prices.

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American healthcare spending is still WAY higher than pretty much all other industrialized countries. But not that long ago, things were different. The US didn’t spend nearly as much in this realm. What changed? Demographics? More sickness? Nah. Spoiler alert, prices have risen much, much faster than the rate of inflation. We’ve got a few suggestions for getting it under control.

 

What all these health care mergers mean for patients

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The health care industry is on a mergers-and-acquisitions bender right now. But, as my colleague Bob Herman reports this morning, it’s not clear whether all of that consolidation will leave patients any better off.

  • Five proposed megamergers have been announced just within the past few weeks. They would create the top two largest non-profit hospital systems in the country. The proposed CVS-Aetna deal alone would be creating a giant pharmacy chain, clinic operator, pharmacy benefit manager and health insurer — all under one roof.

Why now? As more Baby Boomers age into Medicare and more low-income families gain coverage through the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, hospitals are taking on a lot more patients whose bills get paid by the government.

  • Merging into bigger, more concentrated health systems gives them more bargaining power with private insurance, where they can command higher rates than what they get from Medicare and Medicaid

Yes, but: The risk to the broader system is that health care companies might see savings from mergers, but people won’t feel the benefits.

  • “If you become too big, you don’t have the incentives to turn that into lower prices for consumers. That’s sort of the sticking point for when the merger gets out of hand for its size and scope,” says Tim Greaney, a former Department of Justice antitrust official who’s now a health law professor at the UC Hastings.

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CVS merger with Aetna: Health care cure or curse?

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The announcement that CVS plans to acquire Aetna for US$69 billion raises hope and concerns.

The transaction would create a new health care giant. Aetna is the third-largest health insurer in the United States, insuring about 46.7 millionpeople.

CVS operates 9,700 pharmacies and 1,000 MinuteClinics. A decade ago, it also purchased Caremark and now operates CVS/Caremark, a pharmacy benefits manager, a type of business that administers drug benefit programs for health plans. CVS/Caremark is one of the three largest pharmacy benefits managers in the United States. Along with ExpressScripts and OptummRXTogether, these three control at least 80 percent of the market.

Should American consumers be happy or concerned about the proposed merger? As a professor of health law and bioethics, I see compelling arguments on both sides.

Good for consumers, or for the companies?

CVS and Aetna assert they are motivated by a desire to improve services for consumers and that the merger will lower health care costs and improve outcomes.

Many industry experts have postulated, however, that financial gain is at the heart of the deal.

CVS has suffered declining profits as consumers turn to online suppliers for drugs. Reports that Amazon is considering entry into the pharmacy business raise the specter of increasingly fierce competition.

The merger would provide CVS with guaranteed business from Aetna patients and allow Aetna to expand into new health care territory.

The heart of the deal

The merger would eliminate the need for a pharmacy benefits manager because CVS would be part of Aetna.

Pharmacy benefits managers, which sprang up in the early 2000s in response to rising costs of care, administer drug benefit programs for health plans. Most large employers contract with pharmacy benefits managers that are different from their health insurers.

Nevertheless, a consolidation along the lines of a CVS/Caremark and Aetna merger would not be unprecedented. The nation’s largest health insurance company, United Healthcare, operates its own pharmacy benefits manager, OptumRx.

Pharmacy benefits managers process and pay prescription drug claims, negotiate with manufacturers for lower drug prices, and can employ other cost-saving mechanisms. They thus act as intermediaries between the insurer and pharmacies.

They also make a lot of money. They have been controversial in recent years for how they do so, allegedly keeping a keener focus on profits than on patients.

The merger has not been finalized and requires approval from government regulators, which isn’t always easy to get. In 2016 the U.S. Department of Justice sued to block two health insurer mergers: one between Aetna and Humana and a second between Anthem and Cigna. The government objected on antitrust grounds, arguing that the mergers would unduly restrict competition. Both efforts were abandoned.

CVS and Aetna argue that their proposed merger is different. It is a vertical rather than a horizontal merger, which means that it would combine companies providing different services for patients (insurance and filling prescriptions) rather than two companies doing the same thing.

However, the Trump administration is currently opposing another vertical merger, that between AT&T and Time Warner. It is unclear whether the administration will likewise oppose the CVS/Aetna merger.

Benefits of a merger

There is some evidence that a merger could help consumers.

A merger could result in more negotiating power. Combining the power of a leading pharmacy and a top insurer may allow CVS/Aetna to negotiate more effectively for price discounts from drug and device manufacturers.

It also could cut out the middleman. PBMs themselves have been blamed for raising health care costs. They often do not pass on negotiated drug discounts to consumers, but rather keep the money themselves. In addition, many believe they “make money through opaque rebates that are tied to drug prices (so their profits rise as those prices do).” With the merger, CVS/Aetna would not need CVS/Caremark to function as an intermediary. Eliminating a profit-seeking middleman from the picture could lower consumer prices.

The merger could provide easy access to health care for minor injuries and illnesses. CVS said it plans to expand its MinuteClinics, walk-in clinics that provide treatment by nurse practitioners for minor conditions. Also, CVS said it would offer more services, such as lab work, nutritional advice, vision and hearing care, and more. Thus, CVS promises that its clinics will become “health hubs.”

Many patients could turn to these clinics instead of seeking more expensive care from physicians or emergency rooms. Furthermore, health hubs could provide “one-stop shopping” convenience for some patients. This could be particularly beneficial to elderly individuals or those with disabilities.

Another benefit could be improved and expanded data analytics, which could result in better care. Combining information from patients’ health insurers with that of their pharmacies, including nonprescription health purchases, may promote better care. CVS pharmacists and health hub providers would be able to monitor and counsel patients regarding chronic disease management, pain management, prenatal care and other matters. Such attention could reduce the risk of complications and hospitalizations and thus also decrease expenditures.

Increase of other risks?

Skeptics argue that the CVS/Aetna merger is unlikely to yield cost savings and improved outcomes. They note that mergers in the health care sector generally lead to higher, not lower, prices and worry about other adverse consequences.

If the market shrinks to fewer pharmacy benefits managers because of consolidation, costs may actually increase. The remaining pharmacy benefits managers may have little incentive to compete with each other by demanding discounts from drug companies. As noted above, they may actually profit from higher pharmaceutical prices and thus welcome increases.

After the merger, Aetna may require those it insures to use only CVS pharmacies. In addition, it may require individuals to turn to CVS MinuteClinics for certain complaints even if patients prefer to visit their own doctors. Such restrictions would mean less choice for consumers, and many may find them to be very distressing.

The merger could also decrease competition and bar other companies from entering the pharmacy market. For example, Aetna may refuse to cover prescription drugs that are not purchased from CVS. In that case, Amazon may find it extremely difficult if not impossible to break into the industry. Less competition, in turn, often means higher prices for consumers.

It is difficult to predict the precise consequences of a CVS/Aetna merger. One way or another, however, its impact will likely be significant.