SNEK POLICY
Healthcare Needs Competition Too
Consolidation can leave patients and employers with fewer meaningful choices and less pricing pressure.
Scrutinize consolidation
Healthcare mergers, anticompetitive contracting, ownership arrangements, and practices that prevent independent providers from competing should receive serious scrutiny.
Make entry possible
Rules should make it easier for legitimate new providers to enter markets while maintaining appropriate health and safety standards.
Competition is still economics
Healthcare is unusual in many ways, but it is not immune from the effects of concentrated market power.
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Why SNEK thinks this
Healthcare markets can become expensive and unresponsive when hospitals, physician groups, insurers, or other large systems dominate a region and patients have little realistic choice. SNEK’s healthcare-right principle does not require accepting monopoly power or assuming every merger creates efficiency.
How it would work
Antitrust enforcement should examine consolidation that materially reduces patient choice, physician independence, insurer competition, or bargaining competition. Licensing, contracting, and reimbursement rules should be reviewed when they exist mainly to protect incumbents from new competitors. Independent clinics, ambulatory centers, telehealth, new hospital models, and other safe competitors should not face unnecessary barriers simply because established systems prefer less competition.
Where we’re flexible or still working it out
Healthcare is not an ordinary retail market. Emergency care, rural hospitals, expensive specialties, and integrated systems can have legitimate scale advantages. SNEK’s position is not to break up every large provider. The test is whether size is producing real efficiency and access or functioning mainly as protected market power.
Related SNEK policies
A Policyholder Bill of Rights • Tell People What Healthcare Costs