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HIGPA President Curtis Rooney responded yesterday to the recently-released MDMA report on the group purchasing industry. Mr. Rooney contested the suggestion that the device manufacturers behind the study would “voluntarily reduce their prices and their profit margins” under the hypothetical new GPO model, calling this concept “a slap in the face of the more than 90% of America’s 5,000+ hospitals that use GPOs.” This is the issue at the core of any cost-savings argument; hospitals can purchase their products from wherever they like, yet in an “aggressive and competitive market”, the hospital executives behind these purchasing decisions voluntarily turn to GPOs to help them find “the best products for the best deal.”
The statement goes on to say:
“All independent, empirical, and non-industry studies of GPOs – including examinations by the GAO, FTC, DOJ, academia, and the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals – have found that GPOs save hospitals money. Moreover, the research and claims of Robert Litan and Hal Singer about the group purchasing industry have already been discredited as ‘fatally flawed’ by the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in Southeast Missouri Hospital v. Bard. Because medical device manufacturers did not like what the U.S. Government Accountability Office found in its most recent analysis of the group purchasing industry, MDMA has chosen to disregard or manipulate the GAO report for its own purposes."
The full text of the most recent GAO report on the group purchasing industry can be found here.
The full 8th Circuit decision in Southeast Missouri v. Bard can be found here. The full district court opinion in St. Francis Medical Center v. C.R. Bard can be found here.