Content area
Full Text
Health care consumers won a significant victory when Massachusetts Suffolk County Superior Court Judge Janet Sanders blocked a settlement that would have allowed Partners HealthCare, the system that dominates the Boston area, to acquire three additional health care providers in eastern Massachusetts. Sanders concluded that the acquisitions “would cement Partners' already strong position in the health care market and give it the ability, because of this market muscle, to exact higher prices from insurers for the services its providers render.”
If this decision is not overturned on appeal, consumers will now be spared those projected price increases. But there is an even bigger reason for New Englanders to celebrate the judge's ruling. The danger lay not only in Partners' expanded dominance but also in the degree to which the settlement would have shut out other innovative competitors.
Sanders's ruling closes the latest chapter in the saga of Partners HealthCare, a system formed in 1994 as a merger between the world-famous Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women's Hospitals. Beginning in 2010, then Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley presciently warned of Partners' growing pricing power, and her office issued several reports revealing that the merged entity often charged two to three times as much as other equal-quality systems treating patients with equally complex conditions.1 According to an independent agency created to control Massachusetts health care costs — the highest per capita health care costs among U.S. states — Partners was able to leverage its dominant hospital and physician network to extract favorable pricing from private health insurers. The agency opined that Partners' expansion plans were likely to continue increasing costs in these markets with no impact on quality.
When Partners initiated its most recent expansion effort in 2012, Coakley sued to curb the plan. But Partners reached a settlement with the attorney general that would have allowed it to consummate its acquisitions...