Hazards of hospital consolidations

Editor's Note

Consolidation of hospitals into massive chains threatens healthy competition, reduces patient choice, and could drive up costs, Martin A. Makary, MD, and other Johns Hopkins researchers say.

In this commentary, they caution the Federal Trade Commission to be more vigilant when hospital systems seek approval to consolidate and to pay particular attention to geographic regions where such mergers could create a single dominant system.

If a monopoly hospital system fails, the failure could be far more devastating than failures in other industries (eg, large bank failures) because patients can be left with no medical services within reach, the authors say.

1Department of Surgery, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland 2 Department of Health Policy and Management, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland