Empire
emerging

December 4, 2013 -- I used to work at Mills-Peninsula Health Services (San Mateo and Burlingame) when they were independent hospitals. Alas, this is but a fond memory. I remember Alta Bates in Berkeley before it, too, was swallowed, and Children's and Saint Luke's in San Francisco likewise. The gobbling behemoth is Sutter Health, and the evidence is mounting that consolidation drives up costs.

The article linked above mentions, for example, "$20 for a codeine pill, compared with 50 cents at a pharmacy" which is not entirely evil capitalism at work, as I have expounded recently. However, Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones (discussed here) has fined Sutter an astonishing $46 million (Sutter Health hospitals agree to pay record payment in Department of Insurance lawsuit) for fraudulent anesthesia billing practices.

Besides costing us more, the consolidation trend reduces transparency of pricing. (This, too, has been the topic of one of my rants.) What do things actually cost? You're going in for your colonoscopy, say, and want to know the price tag? Good luck!

When I had mine a few years ago and phoned three different hospitals for price quotes, only one gave me a straight answer, and that was only after repeated calls, getting handed off from one person to the next, etc.

With all this consolidation and emerging empires, it will only get worse.

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