In case you missed it – It’s not just Hospital Watch sounding the alarm on rampant corporate hospital consolidation.

Axios recently reported on a new tool from Yale’s Health Care Affordability Lab that explores the impacts of hospital consolidation and rising market concentration across the country – noting that there have been “around 1,300 mergers among the nation’s approximately 5,000 hospitals” over the last few decades.

“You cannot have a conversation about affordability without having a conversation about hospital costs,” said Adam L. Buckalew, senior advisor for Hospital Watch. “What we have seen is that when hospitals consolidate, their prices go up and the quality does not follow.”

Read more from Axios below.

Axios: The States Where Hospitals Are Most Concentrated

Every hospital in North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming is in a highly concentrated market, according to a blog post from Yale’s new Health Care Affordability Lab.

Why it matters: As rising health care costs put more financial strain on Americans, “one major and underappreciated factor driving price increases is rising consolidation among U.S. hospitals,” the blog post argues.

• It notes that over the past 20 years, there have been around 1,300 mergers among the nation’s approximately 5,000 hospitals. The Federal Trade Commission has taken action on competition concerns against only 13 of the deals.

Between the lines: Maine and Montana aren’t far behind the top three, with 97.4% and 98.4% of their hospitals in highly concentrated markets, respectively.

• None of the hospitals in Washington, D.C., are in concentrated markets, and Rhode Island and New Jersey round out the bottom three.
• The tool used in the blog post defines markets based on a 30-minute travel time in order to determine whether patients have a reasonable choice between facilities.

Yes, but: The most concentrated states also have large rural populations, which can make supporting more than one hospital in a community difficult.

The big picture: Hospitals accounted for 40% of the growth in national health spending between 2022 and 2024 — a much larger share than any other health spending category, per a recent KFF analysis.

Hospital Watch is a watchdog group dedicated to shining a light on corporate hospitals as the top culprit in driving up U.S. healthcare costs – exposing corporate hospitals’ monopolistic practices in price gouging patients with excessive markups and hidden fees with no transparency while forcing patients and employers to pay more for their care. Hospital Watch is a project of Better Solutions for Healthcare.