Before she became a medical journalist and best-selling author, Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal worked in hospital emergency rooms. There she witnessed what she describes as the dysfunctional business America’s health care. According to Dr. Rosenthal, the proposed takeover of Care New England, Rhode Island’s second largest hospital group, by the Massachusetts company, Partners HealthCare, deserves careful scrutiny.
She is a former doctor who has now become a medical journalist and author of a New York Times best-seller, An American Sickness.
If you want to know whether hospital consolidations are good for consumers, consider the 10 rules of the health care market, said Dr. Rosenthal.
Rule Number 7: The bigger the hospital system, the more market clout to demand higher prices.
“You know when we look at the history of health care over the last 25 years there’s been a lot of like: we’re consolidating because we’re lowering the costs for consumers. That often has not happened, right? So there’s good reason to be skeptical,” said Rosenthal.
Dr. Rosenthal said she hopes Rhode Island’s attorney general will look at the Partners’ purchase with the same scrutiny as Massachusetts’ attorney general did in 2015 when Massachusetts’ largest hospital system was trying to expand in Eastern Massachusetts. That takeover was ultimately rejected on groups that it would give Partners too much market power in Massachusetts to increase costs.
