By Morgan Henderson, Abigail Knapp, Morgane Mouslim, Stacey Pogue
As health care provider consolidation drives up prices, some states are expanding their regulatory capacity to oversee mergers and other material transactions. State regulators could benefit from understanding how prices change after such changes, whether they are monitoring specific conditions placed on an approved transaction or post-transaction effects more broadly.
A new report from the Center on Health Insurance Reforms, in partnership with researchers from The Hilltop Institute at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, presents a proof-of-concept analysis comparing prices before and after a hospital merger to assess the feasibility of using federal price transparency data for post-transaction monitoring. The report finds that, despite shortcomings, federal price transparency data can provide actionable signals of post-transaction commercial price dynamics at lower cost and years ahead of what other traditional data sources can provide, making them useful as part of state regulators’ toolkits.
Read the full report here.
