Media Coverage

In “vertical integration” in the healthcare system, one company owns or controls multiple parts of a supply chain and can therefore direct patients to more expensive treatment options. 

Such healthcare integration is occurring at a breakneck pace all across the nation, with endless permutations: Hospitals are buying doctors’ practices and surgery and imaging centers. Insurers are buying doctors’ practices and specialty pharmacies and sometimes merging with pharmacy chains. Hospitals are buying or creating insurers. Private equity firms are behind many of the deals, buying practices, reorganizing operations, paring costs, then selling at a profit in a few years to a hospital or insurer higher up the healthcare food chain.

And while the stated purpose is generally greater efficiency, studies have shown that for patients the net result has been higher prices and no benefit, or worse health outcomes. That’s in part because the purchases have been driven by financial efficiency, not more seamless and attentive care, said Soroush Saghafian, an associate professor at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. What’s more, these transactions occur in a gray zone of competition law, and regulators’ tools to examine or stop them are plodding and not up to the task.

Workers get only about 85 minutes of undisturbed focus a day, and constant task-switching and growing workloads drain the energy creative work needs, writes Diana Shi in Fast Company. The piece argues for managing energy rather than time. Its tips include blocking meeting-free days and silencing notifications, doing solo ideation before group brainstorming (an approach backed by Carnegie Mellon professor Anita Williams Woolley's research on creative "bursts"), and scheduling demanding work for peak hours based on your chronotype, leaving administrative tasks for natural energy dips.

MSU's Anjana Susarla looks at a new benchmark from researchers at Penn, Carnegie Mellon and Harvard that tested frontier AI models on 238 real MBA case studies across 18 disciplines, graded with instructors' own rubrics. Under partial-credit scoring, top models topped 87%, but when every rubric item had to be hit, even the best model fully completed fewer than half the questions. The models were strong on structured, quantitative tasks and weak on open-ended advisory judgment. Drawing on interviews with coauthors Kartik Hosanagar of Wharton and Ramayya Krishnan of CMU's Heinz College, Susarla argues that the scarce skill is moving from producing analysis to verifying it. That shift calls for new apprenticeship models that teach entry-level workers verification and supervision skills earlier.

Despite trade wars and inflation, America has been importing a lot of stuff. The nation as a whole just logged its third-highest month for container imports, which are commercial items — like what consumers buy on Amazon. One big reason behind this boom is that the economy is still pretty strong. Another reason: the economy is really uncertain, partly because the war in the Middle East keeps dragging on and dragging oil prices up. Importers are also also wary of ever-changing tariffs.

With many federal agencies having incurred drastic cuts, the United States will enter a period of radical experimentation over what can be done with nonfederal capabilities for risk management. That will be the case until the advent of a more friendly presidential administration in 2029—or even after that, due to reduced trust in elites and a more populist approach to politics, as noted by Rob Goble in another essay in this series. Moreover, some previous federal risk-management functions may be difficult or costly to restore due to the loss of institutional memory, obsolete or corrupted databases, or simply the fact that repair is usually more expensive than maintenance. In any event, some previous federal functions had already been overly costly, slow, and burdensome. Such functions may be unnecessary or could be performed better and more successfully elsewhere.