For over a month, the multitrillion-dollar health care sector has had to respond to a hack on a payment processor owned by UnitedHealthGroup, the nation's largest insurer.
Too Big to Fail Redux? Ignore for a moment the fact that Change Health Care, the UnitedHealth affiliate whose payment processing operations were attacked, reportedly paid $22 million to the ransomware group behind the hack - which will of course only encourage future efforts to target health care entities in cyberspace.
When a company is processing what amounts to a medical claim for more than 1 in 10 Americans each and every day, that is bound to extend its reach far and wide in the health care system.
Encouraging More Consolidation How did we get to this point? Why was the nation's largest health insurer able to buy such a critically important payment processor? Good question.
For years, Obamacare has encouraged hospitals, insurers, and physician offices to merge and combine, part of a competition not to provide better care to patients - but to gain market share and leverage over other participants in the health sector.
Put another way, the antitrust concerns go well beyond the nation's largest health insurer owning the nation's largest health care payment processor, a transaction the Justice Department tried and failed to block in 2021-22.
The more health care grows and grows, the greater the calls for taxpayer-funded bailouts will rise the next time a crisis hits.
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