Private Equity’s Impact on Physician Practices: Unpacking Markets, Competition, and Prices

On this episode of Ruled by Reason, AAI President Diana Moss hosts two leading healthcare competition experts. Laura Alexander is Director of Markets and Competition Policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and Brent Fulton is Associate Research Professor of Health Economics and Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Associate Director of the Petris Center on Health Care Markets and Consumer Welfare. They take up an increasingly troubling issue in healthcare competition: growing private equity ownership of physician practices. The conversation previews major takeaways from a soon to be released study between AAI, UC Berkeley, and WCEG, funded by a grant from the Arnold Foundation. Moss, Alexander, and Fulton discuss the penetration of private equity ownership in the U.S. across a variety of physician practice areas, growth in market share and concentration, and effects on prices. This episode is a must-listen for those following consolidation in critical healthcare markets and its implications for prices, healthcare costs, antitrust enforcement and healthcare policy.

Laura Alexander is the director of markets and competition policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Her primary areas of research include healthcare markets, private equity, residential real estate sales, privacy policy, and labor market monopsony. Previously, she was the vice president of policy at the American Antitrust Institute. Alexander also is an experienced litigator, having represented plaintiffs and defendants in antitrust and other cases through trial and appeals. Alexander is also Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University.

Brent D. Fulton is Associate Research Professor of Health Economics and Policy in the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley and Associate Director of the Petris Center on Health Care Markets and Consumer Welfare His research examines how markets and regulation can improve the delivery of healthcare, including its cost, quality, and access. He has analyzed healthcare mergers and acquisitions, healthcare payment and delivery system reforms, accountable care organizations, health workforce, and cost analysis.