Does anybody still care about primary care?

Tincture April 14, 2018
David Harlow

Vertical mergers in healthcare are changing the landscape. Is that a good thing?

Once the federales blocked the health insurance company mega-mergers, it was only a matter of time before alternative approaches to rearranging the three-dimensional chessboard of the healthcare-industrial complex would emerge. The approach du jour is the vertical merger.

Horizontal combinations trigger the familiar antitrust reviews of market share and the orthodoxy of antitrust enforcement dictates that two insurers, selling the same product or service into the same market or markets, cannot merge if they will reduce competition as a result. The very idea of collapsing four of the five dominant national health care insurance companies into two was therefore a nonstarter.

But vertical mergers,...