Obamacare is benefitting the biggest hospitals and insurers, and that’s not a good thing

These days, when liberals defend Obamacare, they often say something along the lines of, Look, Obamacare can’t be that bad, even big business likes it!

A writer at the liberal Mother Jones defended Obamacare by pointing out that the largest hospital chain in America is fighting to save the law.

Wendell Potter, at the Center for Public Integrity, seems to think it’s a rebuke to Obamacare’s critics that the nation’s largest health insurer is making bank off the law:

Anyone who still thinks the Affordable Care Act was a “government takeover of health care” should consider this headline from the news pages of last Thursday’s Investor’s Business Daily:

UnitedHealth Profit Soars On Obamacare, Optum—April 16, 2015

That’s from a Wall Street publication whose editorial writers have rarely missed an opportunity to bash the health care reform law.

This is an odd sort of reasoning: Growing profits of the biggest companies (often accompanied by industry consolidation) shows that federal regulation and subsidy of those industries is successful. Maybe this is how liberals think you argue like a conservative. On the other hand, it’s not altogether surprising to hear liberals, who tend to favor centralization and worry about the chaos of pluralism and competition, to applaud “rationalization” of industry through consolidation and stability in favor of diminished competition. And Obamacare, by all appearances, is a major factor in the industry’s push to consolidation.

But consolidation in health care is dangerous. An op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, by physician Marty Makary, lays out the dangers of hospital consolidation:

A study of more than 150 hospital-owned and physician-owned organizations published last October in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that patient costs are 19.8 percent higher for physician groups in multi-hospital systems compared with physician-owned organization….

As a busy surgeon, I have serious concerns about the race to consolidate America’s hospitals because of the risk that very large organizations may govern without valuing the wisdom of their front-line employees.

Big Government often benefits Big Business to the detriment of competition, and thus consumers.

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