The new study says that this rarely happens. The study, reported in the May 3 issue of Modern Healthcare , looked at price changes for private-pay patients in 400 merging hospitals. For-profit mergers were followed by price hikes averaging 20 percent. Public hospital mergers led to 13 percent increases. Private nonprofits raised prices 6.7 percent.
Mergers reduce competition, making price increases possible.
The study compared 329 HMOs, some investor-owned and some nonprofit, using 14 measures of quality care. The measures ranged from preventive care like childhood immunization and mammography, to care for seriously ill patients, such as eye exams for diabetics. On every measure, the investor-owned HMOs performed worse. Between 1995 and 1998, the proportion of HMO members in for-profit plans grew from 26 percent to 62 percent. The authors calculated that if every American woman between the ages of 50 and 69 were enrolled in investor-owned HMOs, about 5,925 more women would die of breast cancer because these HMOs conduct fewer mammograms.