In Most of the US, Self-insured Employers Lack Power at the Bargaining Table With Hospitals

Managed Care Cast

In this episode of Managed Care Cast, the lead author of an article in the July issue of The American Journal of Managed Care® describes the latest research that looks at the power of self-insured employers to negotiate hospital prices and the relationship between employer market power and hospital prices. Matthew Eisenberg, PhD, and coauthors used the US Census Bureau County Business Patterns data from 2010 to 2016 to estimate employer market power in metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) and used Truven Health MarketScan commercial claims to estimate mean hospital prices and price ratios at the MSA level. The paper, "Large Self-insured Employers Lack Power to Effectively Negotiate Hospital Prices," notes a few alternative ways that employers have tried to increase their ability to raise their purchasing power, but the success has been limited. Eisenberg, an economist and assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, joined Managed Care Cast to discuss these findings.