- Center on Health Equity & Access
- Clinical
- Health Care Cost
- Health Care Delivery
- Insurance
- Policy
- Technology
- Value-Based Care
In Most of the US, Self-insured Employers Lack Power at the Bargaining Table With Hospitals
In this episode of Managed Care Cast, the lead author of an article in the July issue of The American Journal of Managed Care describes the latest research that looks at the power of self-insured employers to negotiate hospital prices and the relationship between employer market power and hospital prices.
In this episode of Managed Care Cast, the lead author of an article in the July issue of The American Journal of Managed Care® describes the latest research that looks at the power of self-insured employers to negotiate hospital prices and the relationship between employer market power and hospital prices.
Matthew Eisenberg, PhD, and coauthors used US Census Bureau County Business Patterns data from 2010 to 2016 to estimate employer market power in metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) and used Truven Health MarketScan commercial claims to estimate mean hospital prices and price ratios at the MSA level.
The paper, "Large Self-insured Employers Lack Power to Effectively Negotiate Hospital Prices," notes a few alternative ways that employers have tried to increase their ability to raise their purchasing power, but success has been limited.
Eisenberg, an economist and assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, joined Managed Care Cast to discuss these findings.
Listen above or through one of these podcast services:
LLMs Show Promise, But Challenges Remain in Improving Inefficient Clinical Trial Screening
July 31st 2025Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 may offer a solution to the costly and inefficient process of manual clinical trial screening, which is often hindered by the inability of structured electronic health record data to capture all necessary criteria.
Read More
Trump Directs Pharma Companies on Cutting Drug Prices Under Most-Favored-Nation Order
July 31st 2025President Donald Trump has sent letters to pharmaceutical companies, aiming to compel them to lower drug prices in the US to match the lowest prices offered in other developed nations, a move that could significantly reduce costs and disrupt the current system of pharmacy benefit managers.
Read More
