GPOs and the health care supply chain: market-based solutions and real-world recommendations to reduce pricing secrecy and benefit health care providers.

In An Empirical Analysis of Aftermarket Transaction by Hospitals, the authors Robert E. Litan, Hal J. Singer, and Anna Birkenbach suggest public policy changes to the law governing hospital group purchasing organizations (GPOs). Their recommendations, however, appear to be based on a common fallacy and on selective data. Therefore, their conclusions are questionable. In response, we address their arguments, raise questions about the data used, and make our own public policy recommendations that promise to save the health care industry billions of dollars without disrupting the current system. We strongly believe Congress should pursue our important recommendations. In the spirit of public debate, we asked the authors to provide us the data on which they based their published conclusions, so that we could empirically test the veracity of these figures for ourselves. Confidentiality clauses in the authors’ contract with the company providing the information