Health Care Market Oversight

In the first half of 2025, states enacted numerous laws to strengthen their health care markets. These new laws address several recurring policy issues affecting states across the country, including skyrocketing health care costs, increased consolidation in the healthcare sector, and the heightened penetration of private equity in health care systems. This brief highlights trends in state health policy across four major themes and identifies states that have made significant reforms in each of these areas this year. More

This issue brief examines how three of these states —Massachusetts, Oregon, and California — have strengthened cost growth target accountability. It also highlights five states — California, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Oregon — that have leveraged their cost growth targets in other health care oversight programs. More

Private equity firms, insurance companies, and other corporate entities are using MSOs to bypass state prohibitions on the corporate practice of medicine, allowing large corporations to functionally own medical practices and influence clinical care. More

“If this is love I want my money back” – Hot Tuna  This sentiment may well capture the mood in US primary care today. The 2021 National… More

In Woonsocket, Rhode Island, Steward was sent packing and the community staved off the private equity beast. The result has been less than universally satisfying, but as states and communities struggle with health system consolidation, health care affordability, and difficult resource allocation decisions, this story of how the private equity wolves were thwarted may offer lessons.    More

A Milbank State Leadership Network virtual briefing featured a presentation on new models of enhanced market oversight and insight from state attorneys general offices. More

In New York, a new law requires that the state incorporate a health equity analysis into its review of proposed health facility changes, especially… More

State health care market oversight programs, like Oregon’s, can serve as important complements to antitrust enforcement as these programs can review transactions of various sizes, examine the cumulative effects of small transactions on markets, and evaluate transactions across a much wider array of factors beyond just antitrust implications. More