Is bigger better?

Many in healthcare, from health systems to physician practices, are responding to the current uncertainty in healthcare by bulking up, an instinct likely programmed into our neural systems in prehistoric times. The Federal Trade Commission pushed back when it filed suit against Boise, ID-based St. Luke’s Health System’s purchase of the 43-physician Saltzer Medical Group on anticompetitive grounds, and a federal judge agreed, ordering that the merger be dissolved. Rival hospital Saint Alphonsus set off the protest when it filed suit after its own offer to buy the primary-care practice was spurned. One observer called the federal policy toward provider consolidation “schizophrenic” and another suggested that hospitals are likely to pull back on physician purchases, especially when a practice has a dominant position in a market.