Tag: 60 Minutes

There was a recent 60 Minutes episode with a segment that talked about why healthcare prices are so high, and I learned a couple new things.

The segment focused on Sutter Health, which is a large healthcare system in Northern California. Sutter Health was the bad guy in this episode, but the American Hospital Association dutifully provided a counter-argument to the story here.

For context, remember that the price negotiations between hospitals and insurers are not based on costs but rather bargaining power. The more bargaining power the hospital has over the insurer, the higher the prices they win.

Here is Sutter Health’s strategy to win more bargaining power, according to the 60 Minutes segment:

First, buy up other hospitals to become a monopoly in as many markets as possible. If you cannot be a complete monopoly somewhere, find a way to become a monopoly over a key service line, such as maternity care. Next, require two things in every contract you make with an insurer–a gag clause (so nobody can divulge the prices agreed upon) and an all-or-nothing clause (so the insurer has to have all the system’s hospitals and services in network or none of them).

The combination of all that leads to the hospital having much greater bargaining power.

How?

The insurers are kind of forced to have Sutter Health in their networks to avoid having important gaps in coverage (either a regional gap if the one hospital in that county isn’t in network, or a service-specific gap if Sutter Health is the only provider of that service in an area). They leverage that foot in the door with the all-or-nothing clause, so now basically every insurer is compelled to include every Sutter Health hospital, so Sutter Health can demand very high prices and get away with it. And, for Sutter Health’s protection against the bad PR they would get by charging such high prices, they have the gag clauses in place.

Pretty clever I’d say. Unfortunately for them, the government tends to notice when a hospital system becomes a monopoly in multiple ways, and they also notice when a hospital system is making a lot more money than others around it. So they get investigated, reporters dig up the juicy story, and the government slaps a few wrists with lawsuits and new regulations.

Is there a better, long-term solution to these tactics? I have a few thoughts on the matter. First, there’s nothing like monopoly rents to draw competition to a market, so allowing healthcare entrepreneurs to enter those monopolized markets/service lines would be a great start. And if Sutter Health’s competitor hospitals start doing some thorough cost accounting, they could know how much their different services cost and be able to start setting competitive “out-of-network prices.” When those competitors start winning market share, Sutter Health will have to respond with lower prices and more price transparency to become competitive again themselves.

So many market failures are solved by price transparency.