“ The insurance company would not only have every incentive to control the doctors’ and the hospitals’ costs, but also the means to do so. … Conversely, the hospitals and doctors would have no incentive to inflate costs or overtreat, because their ultimate boss… would be getting `the bill when those extra costs hit his insurance company. [Glenn Steele, Jr.] had already proved this on a smaller scale at Geisinger.”

A few years ago the hospital embarked on a campaign to buy up all medical practices with the aim of having all local physicians as their employees. Those who wished to remain independent have suffered the consequences of dwindling practices and worse.

‘Increases in hospital market concentration lead to increases in the price of hospital care,’ reported the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a respected healthcare think tank that had just finished an elaborate survey of hospital pricing. The report also stated that ‘at least in some procedures, hospital concentration reduces quality.’

We ask LNP to join us in requesting that merger talks be put on hold and to requests public forums be held around the county where questions can be posed and answers required.

This will not improve care; it will syphon funds to Penn. There is no “weakness” in our healthcare system and LGH is a cash cow. Penn gets LGH, the community loses autonomy, and the LGH leadership gets promises of golden parachutes for selling out a public entity.

The second path is to rely on antitrust enforcement to crack down on hospital mergers and acquisitions and, more importantly in the long run, to make it easier for new medical providers to enter the business and to compete with hospitals.

When the Lancaster public was informed of the local transaction of the century, that Lancaster General Health was on the cusp of completing a merger into the University of Pennsylvania Health System, the news was generated not by LNP but from an Associated Press report entitled “LG Health Nears Deal To Join Penn Medicine.”

“A separate report issued by auditor Grant Thornton LLP in October says the organization’s total surplus for fiscal year 2014 was $148 million, up from $100.7 million the previous year.”</em

The new 10-year master collaboration agreement, which was unveiled Monday, aims to expand patient options for affordable health care, use group purchasing and other initiatives to reduce costs, enable AHN to improve care by tapping the resources of Johns Hopkins’ Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, and let both organizations team up on new electronic record platforms and various research efforts.

Ms. Little’s seemingly minor medical problem — she had the least dangerous form of skin cancer — racked up big bills because it involved three doctors from specialties that are among the highest compensated in medicine, and it was done on the grounds of a hospital. Many specialists have become particularly adept at the business of medicine by becoming more entrepreneurial, protecting their turf through aggressive lobbying by their medical societies, and most of all, increasing revenues by offering new procedures — or doing more of lucrative ones…