HHS Mandates 10-Year Study Tracking State-by-State Healthcare Competition and Consolidation

The “Measuring State Healthcare Freedom Act” isn’t about setting new policy or changing your insurance plan today; it’s about pulling back the curtain on the healthcare marketplace. This legislation mandates a serious, ten-year annual study conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to track exactly how competitive—or consolidated—the healthcare industry is across every state.

The Data Deep Dive: What HHS Will Be Tracking

Think of this study as a mandatory, decade-long audit of the healthcare system. The Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at HHS is required to work with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division to gather specific data points. For people who feel like their healthcare choices are shrinking, this data collection is critical. The study will track every hospital merger, every acquisition of an outpatient clinic, and even changes in telehealth providers (SEC. 2).

Beyond counting the big business moves, the study will focus on two things that hit closer to home: professional licensing and market concentration. They will look at all the rules doctors, nurses, and specialists have to follow to get and keep their licenses, including residency requirements. Are these rules helping patients or just creating barriers for new providers? That’s what the data should help reveal. Crucially, they’ll calculate the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI)—the standard measure of market concentration—for hospitals and specialized outpatient services. If that number is high in your area, it likely means fewer choices and potentially higher prices for you.

Why Transparency Matters to Your Wallet

For the average person juggling premiums and deductibles, this study means a future where regulators and lawmakers have much clearer data to work with. If you live in a rural area where the local hospital just bought the only specialized clinic, this study will officially document that concentration of power. The bill requires HHS to track state laws that either require approval for hospital mergers or control the building of new facilities (SEC. 2). By tracking this, the government is essentially creating a public scorecard on how state regulations might be helping or hurting competition.

What makes this mandate powerful is the transparency requirement. Every year for the next decade, HHS must not only report the findings to Congress but also make the full report and all the raw data publicly available on their website in an interactive format (SEC. 2). This means researchers, journalists, and consumer advocates can actually use the information to push for changes in states where competition is clearly failing. While this study is a huge administrative lift for HHS and the FTC, it is a significant step toward getting objective facts about who controls healthcare access and costs in your state.