Get Involved
By Joe Carlson and Melanie Evans
With the Federal Trade Commission showing renewed interest in policing mergers among healthcare providers, Chairwoman Edith Ramirez appointed noted healthcare economist Martin Gaynor to lead the commission’s Economics Bureau.
Gaynor will join the FTC from Carnegie Mellon University, where he holds a chair in health systems management at Heinz College. Gaynor will head a division of the FTC that produces economic analyses to support antitrust and consumer-protection investigations.
He is an active presence in health policy research and debate as board chairman of the Health Care Cost Institute, a research repository of commercial insurance data, and with an active presence on Twitter. (He will likely curtail his tweets during his stint at the FTC, he said in less than 140 characters.)
Gaynor also regularly writes on health policy on his blog, “Compassionate Economics” (martingaynor.blogspot.com). “There has been a great deal of consolidation in healthcare markets in recent years, especially in hospital and insurance markets, but also in physician markets and between the different kinds of market participants (e.g., insurers-hospitals, hospitals-physicians, etc.),” he wrote in an August post.
“Consolidation has resulted in few, if any documented benefits, and has harmed competition and led to increased prices, reduced quality, and impeded the emergence of new, innovative forms of healthcare delivery. Antitrust enforcement can help solve problems in specific markets. It can also have a deterrent effect on those considering anti-competitive actions.”
He starts his new job Oct. 1.