The continuing urge to merge in the hospital sector could not only lead to more obstacles in obtaining care, but could create a "too big to fail" culture in which government regulators may have to bail out hospital operators if they enter into financial difficulties. That was the assessment of Marty Makary, M.D., a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and his colleagues, writing in the most recent edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association. According to their research, there is not a single highly competitive market for hospitals in the 306 geographic markets they studied, and about half of those markets have hospital operators that have a single entity as the dominant healthcare services provider. Read the full article at FierceHealthcare