Close Close
Popular Financial Topics Discover relevant content from across the suite of ALM legal publications From the Industry More content from ThinkAdvisor and select sponsors Investment Advisor Issue Gallery Read digital editions of Investment Advisor Magazine Tax Facts Get clear, current, and reliable answers to pressing tax questions
Luminaries Awards
ThinkAdvisor

Life Health > Health Insurance > Your Practice

Hearing Witness: PPACA Is Scaring Capital Away from Health Services

X
Your article was successfully shared with the contacts you provided.

Will full implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA) increase competiton in the healthcare market or decrease it?

Witnesses debated that question recently at a hearing organized by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee subcommittee that handles issues involving competition.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Washington, argued that PPACA will reduce the level competition and the overall supply of health care, by turning doctors into salaried, less productive wage slaves and reducing the supply of capital entrepreneurs need to create new and better ways to deliver health care.

Traditionally, venture capitalists have helped entrepreneurs develop innovations such as health maintenance organization plans and long-term care hospitals, Gottlieb said, according to a written version of his testimony posted on the committee website.

In some cases, Gottlieb said, the entrepreneurs have profited by moving patients to lower-cost settings, from high-cost settings, and taking a share of the savings.

“PPACA contains deliberate provisions aimed at regulating returns on invested  capital, discouraging different forms of entrepreneurship,” Gottlieb said. “These provisions are, in  many cases, the expression of a political philosophy that guides a number of  provisions in PPACA. That philosophy views profits earned on the provision of care  as money that should have been channeled instead into direct patient care. The result is that entrepreneurs are not pursuing new health services ventures. Capital flowing to these endeavors has fallen sharply. The lack of incentive for  entrepreneurs further entrenches existing players, meaning that tools that could  help better coordinate care (for example, health care information technology) are only adopted through outright subsidies to existing providers, rather than through the  creation of new approaches to replace an existing way of delivering care.”

Thomas Greaney, a health law researcher at St. Louis University, said that PPACA ought to increase competition, and that the laws and regulations now governing the U.S. health care system have been reducing the level of competition for years.


NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.