The Wall Street Journal recently reported on research that tries to blame a wide variety of communities’ economic challenges on their local hospitals, particularly local hospitals that affiliate or integrate with larger health systems.
As the American Hospital Association noted, “the study uses extremely limited and disparate data” in a biased attempt to justify extreme and shocking conclusions — even blaming hospitals for trends like suicide rates. These wild claims are simplistic, ill-founded, and deeply insulting to the caregivers that work tirelessly around the clock, every hour of every day, to serve individuals suffering acute health crises, including behavioral health.
In their effort to pin blame on hospitals, the study’s authors:
- ignore the outsized impact of corporate insurance companies raising premiums and drug companies raising prices on patients and employers;
- fail to adequately control for broader economic, demographic, and regional trends that also impact jobs;
- make no effort to gauge the ways cuts to hospitals would harm communities, local economies, and patients’ health; and
- exclude job creation within the health sector in their analysis of hospitals’ impact on employment.
As the AHA points out, the shoddy research was paid for by special interests who are lobbying tirelessly for policymakers to take resources away from patients and local hospitals:
“[The study], unsurprisingly, was funded by Arnold Ventures, offering yet another example of that group’s willingness to back even the sloppiest work as long as it paints hospitals in the most negative light.”
Worst of all, however, is their effort to link suicide rates with hospital pricing. Quite frankly, it is unconscionable given the lengths hospitals go to every day to save people who have attempted or are at risk of taking their own life.
Hospitals and health systems know as much as anyone about the scourge of suicide in this country. Across the country, people in acute psychiatric distress (including children) are getting stuck in hospital emergency departments because there isn’t the space or the workforce available to care for them earlier or in the appropriate alternative setting. The emotional and physical toll of caring for these patients is incredibly hard on hospitals’ teams.
Here are the facts: Hospital integration can be a lifeline that helps prevent service line cuts and hospital closures and brings major benefits to patients and communities:
- Integration can stabilize local hospitals and reduce their costs, preventing at-risk hospitals from having to cut services or close.
- Research analyzing more than a decade of data has found that rural hospitals that were acquired were less likely to close.
- Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic shows that rural hospitals affiliated with systems were more likely to have stable finances.
- Multiple studies show that hospitals see significant reductions in operating expenses following an acquisition.
- Integration can upgrade the quality of care available to patients.
- A significant share of local hospitals that integrate into health systems added at least one new service after integration.
- After integration, local hospitals are often able to form new collaborations, leverage partnerships, and mitigate workforce shortages through shared staff, expertise, and resources.
- Integration can improve patients’ health outcomes.
- A study including hundreds of hospitals found that patients at merged hospitals saw greater decreases in mortality across a number of serious health conditions, including heart failure and stroke.
By preventing closures, integration helps secure and protect the significant economic benefits that local hospitals provide to their communities:
- Hospitals are major employers.
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- In 2022, community hospitals directly employed more than 6.4 million people and supported 24.6 million jobs across the nation.
- Rural hospitals account for 1 in 12 rural jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars in economic output.
- Hospitals are key economic engines.
- In 2022, community hospitals purchased nearly $1.3 trillion in goods and services from other businesses and supported $4.4 trillion in total economic activity.
While hospitals and health systems put patients first, corporate insurers and other entities are buying up hospitals to increase their own profits:
- Hospital integration is not the main driver of physician consolidation.
- From 2019–2023, health insurers and other kinds of entities acquired far more physicians than hospitals did. Hospitals and health systems accounted for only 8 percent of physician acquisitions.
- Insurer premiums rose faster than hospital prices.
- According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, hospitals’ annual price growth averaged about 2% from 2013–2023, while the annual premium for employer-based family coverage has increased 5% on average since 2010.
- Insurer consolidation results in higher premiums — and the savings aren’t passed down.
- Research has found that insurer consolidation increases insurance companies’ market power and leads to higher costs, not lower costs.
Special interests are trying to pretend that local hospitals hurt their communities. Patients and caregivers know that’s backwards. It’s time to correct the record and push back on the campaign to cut care, hurt patients, and harm communities.
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