New healthcare poll shows most Texas voters want government regulation for healthcare mergers – Houston Public Media

A new healthcare poll from Texas 2036 shows most Texas voters are interested in government regulation for healthcare mergers.

Texas 2036 is a non-partisan public policy research and advocacy organization. They consider the state’s future as it turns 200 years old in a little over a decade. 1,001 Texans were polled by Texas 2036 in November. Seventy-five percent of those surveyed were in agreement that the state should more actively regulate healthcare mergers.

Health Policy Director Charles Miller said this interest is a first for his research.

“I don’t think that’s reflecting a change away from the competitive free-market values of Texas, but I do think it’s indicative that people are recognizing that healthcare markets are broken and maybe we need some lighter touch regulation to restore that competition,” he said.

Last year, HB 711 outlawed anti-competitive contracting practices and allowed employers to steer patients to higher-performing centers. Miller said this wasn’t the case in the past.

“Let’s imagine there’s an area where there’s really only one hospital that provides childbirth,” he said. “Every employer, every plan is going to have to have that hospital in their network because there’s no choice.

There could be a lot of regular primary care doctors in the area, and so we could have a competitive marketplace there, but if the health system that owns that one hospital also starts buying up some of those doctor practices, they could tell employers, ‘If you want our hospital in your network, you have to have all of our doctors in your network also, and what’s more is, you can’t tell or incentivize your employees to go anywhere else. Regardless of what the price is, regardless of what the quality is.”

Miller said sometimes, when a larger health system buys up smaller practices, it may also lead to an increase in facility fees.

Ninety-one percent of those polled believe Texans have a right to know who owns their hospitals, doctor’s offices, and health insurers. Miller added there’s a push for more price transparency in the upcoming year.

“We think there’s a lot of strong influence and interest in furthering the efforts around price transparency,” he said. “We want to see more transparency around quality, removing some of those barriers that insurers and employers currently face about ranking our medical providers and passing that information along to those individuals. And then, there’s also some barriers in place that are preventing those health benefit plans from steering or incentivizing their employees to going to that high-value care.”

The full brochure for the poll, which was released last week, can be found online.