This bill would require the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) at the Department of Health and Human Services to conduct a yearly study for 10 years about competition and consolidation in State-level health care markets. ASPE must consult with the Federal Trade Commission Chair and the Justice Department Antitrust Division, and may obtain data from the FTC. The study lists specific things to collect: licensing rules for health workers; mergers and acquisitions involving hospitals, outpatient practices, surgical centers, insurers, habilitative service providers, and telehealth; State laws on certificates of public advantage and certificates of need; availability of alternative insurance such as short-term limited duration plans and association health plans; counts of hospitals, practices, surgical centers, insurers, and habilitative providers at the start and end of each year; and Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) measures for certain services. ASPE must send an annual report to four congressional committees and publish the report and interactive datasets on its website each year.
If enacted, the bill would create a regular public source of data about how concentrated health care providers and insurers are in each State. The reports and datasets would be available online and could be used by state officials, researchers, journalists, and the public to see changes in provider numbers, mergers, licensure rules, and market concentration over time.
No publicly available information on costs or funding appears in the bill text or metadata. The bill does not include an explicit appropriation or a Congressional Budget Office cost estimate in the provided text.
No publicly available information in the bill text or metadata describes proponents’ statements or arguments for the bill.
No publicly available information in the bill text or metadata describes opponents’ statements or arguments against the bill.