Hospitals are Incompetent Monopolists!

By JEFF GOLDSMITH The health policy community is obsessed with hospital mergers. In a recent paper which I critiqued, the operating thesis was that hospital mergers are conspiracies in restraint of trade, enabling hospitals to extract rent from helpless local employers and patients. This logic leads directly to advocacy (lavishly funded by Arnold Ventures philanthropy) of hospital rate controls as the only way of restraining this abuse of economic power. The reality is, as you might expect, somewhat different. The following chart, courtesy of healthcare data firm Trilliant Health, sh