“Hospital Mergers Kill”: An Economists’ Exercise in Reality Distortion – The Health Care Blog
In late June, 2024, two economists, Zarek Brot-Goldberg and Zack Cooper, from the University of Chicago and Yale respectively, released an economic analysis arguing that hospital mergers damage local economies and result in an increase in deaths by suicide and drug overdoses in the markets where mergers occur. Funded by Arnold Ventures their study characterizes these mergers as “rent seeking activities” by hospitals seeking to use their economic power to extort financial gains from their communities
