You’ll often hear about two hospitals planning to merge together in the local papers. Sometimes this becomes big news and you expect that this will lead to big changes. It’s also true that most of these hospital mergers wind up failing. Why do these hospital mergers seem to fail more often than not?
They Don’t Work on Containing Costs
Perhaps the biggest reason why hospital mergers fail is that they don’t work on containing costs. Theoretically, a hospital merger should help to drive costs down and reduce waste. Sadly, this almost never happens after a hospital merger. Hospitals don’t actually merge to benefit the patients or pass the costs down to them because what they’re really after is market control.
A hospital acquires another hospital and it then controls things in a given area. This allows them to have even more negotiating leverage over insurers. It can lead to increased prices for patients and this is incredibly problematic. The healthcare industry in America is largely a for-profit system and this leads to many issues for average Americans.
The Quality of Care Doesn’t Improve
Another reason why hospital mergers fail to meet expectations is that the quality of care rarely improves at all. You would think that having more professionals and more resources would lead to improved care for patients. This just isn’t the case and the care sometimes stays the same or becomes worse. As a hospital conglomerate becomes bigger, it becomes harder to manage the small things that can make the difference between good experiences and bad ones.
New Technologies Don’t Improve Hospital Income
Hospitals often invest in new technologies so that they can get patients to become more interested in going to their hospitals specifically. A merger could cause hospitals to have more cutting-edge tech but this doesn’t necessarily lead to increased profits for hospitals. Things such as 3D scans and robotic surgeries might sound fancy but they aren’t really improving patient outcomes or moving the needle for profits. This can lead to mergers being deemed financial failures at high rates.