Healthcare consolidation perverted by pricing power

Last week, I noted Eduardo Porter's warning that the ACA was spurring hospital consolidation, which increases the hospitals' pricing power. That's the downside of consolidation. Below, that post is updated with a snapshot of the upside of consolidation, realizable when the power to set prices lies elsewhere.
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Eduardo Porter today spotlights a key factor in healthcare inflation: consolidation among hospitals and other healthcare providers:

What is missing from the stampede of policy innovation is something to tackle one of the best-known causes of high costs in the book: excessive market concentration. 

Two decades ago, there were on average about four rival hospital systems of roughly equal size in each metropolitan area, according to research by Martin S. Gaynor of Carnegie Mellon University and Robert J. Town of the University of Pennsylvania. By 2006, the number of competitors was down to three. 

The share of metropolitan areas with highly concentrated hospital markets, by the standards of antitrust enforcers at the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, rose to 77 percent from 63 percent over the period.