Market Structure in Healthcare

What market structure best describes the environment within which your organization operates? What challenges and opportunities would arise from higher and lower degrees of government intervention? Provide a rationale to support your selected market structure.

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Aug 24, 2023, 6:06 AM

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JA

Jenny Acosta

Aug 25, 2023, 4:04 PM

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Hello class and Professor,

First let’s start with the four classifications of market structure: perfect competition, oligopoly, monopoly, and monopolistic competition. I work in the healthcare setting and healthcare systems fall under an oligopolistic market structure.

There is already a high degree of government intervention in the product and services that can be delivered as well as in what settings. There are several limitations and restrictions that the government imposes to included financial that already affect how our healthcare systems operate. I think an area in which they could intervene a bit more is setting a more consistent fee for services by which one hospital is not going to differ too much from the next. However, that is not necessarily the case within the hospital/healthcare system itself. I believe it is the insurance companies that try and set this sort of limitation on maximizing profit.

I believe that healthcare systems fall under oligopoly market structure because they are a limited number of members that can provide this type of service/product and they even merge and come together sometimes to form huge hospital systems in which they control much of the market in the industry.

Reference

Froeb, L., McCann, B.T., Shor, M., & Ward. M.R. (2018). MindTap for Managerial economics: A problem solving approach (5th ed.). Cengage Learning. ISBN-13: 9781337106580

Miller, S. P. (2023). Market structures. Salem Press Encyclopedia.

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