Hearing Witness: PPACA Is Scaring Capital Away from Health Services

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.