Doug Hastings, Chair of the firm's Board of Directors and Member of the Health Care and Life Sciences practice, in the Washington, DC, office, was quoted in an article titled "Care Coordination May Lead to Less Competition, Higher Prices, Article Says."
Following is an excerpt:
Better medical care may arise from new public policies to promote more coordination from hospitals, doctors and others in healthcare, but there may be a high price to pay, two economists cautioned in a new article.
More coordination may lead to less competition and greater leverage for hospitals and doctors to raise prices, wrote Katherine Baicker of Harvard University and Helen Levy of the University of Michigan, in a New England Journal of Medicine essay that outlines the tension and risks associated with growth of new healthcare payment models. ...
Douglas Hastings, a healthcare antitrust attorney with Epstein Becker and Green, said the University of Michigan economists correctly noted that it's not clear what may be the best combination of coordination and competition.
"We need to evaluate the net effect of the suite of new public and private insurance-market policies on both price and quantity?...," Baicker and Levy wrote.
Hastings cited a recent Brookings Institution report that called for the use of cost and quality data in antitrust enforcement. That data could help inform how well networks or mergers serve the goals of improved care at a lower cost.