Last week, Economic Institute President Micah Weinberg participated in a panel at the Brookings’ Center for Health Policy addressing what worked and what didn’t work in Obamacare insurance markets. Dr. Weinberg pointed out that “you can’t put together competing networks in an area with only one hospital system. If we really care about competition, we need to care about competitors. The competitors we care the most about are actually not the insurance plans, but rather the providers.”
The panel discussion parallels the newly released report Study of Affordable Care Act Competitiveness in California developed by the Economic Institute in partnership with Brookings. The report examines the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in California and assesses the interplay among factors such as health care provider concentration, the choices that the state made in implementation, the underlying market dynamics, and the extent to which the structure of the federal law all contributed to creating these choices for consumers across the many diverse regions of the state.