Gaynor's biography on the webpage of the Health Care Cost Institute, where he serves as chairman, says he has also worked on healthcare policy issues with the FTC and U.S. Justice Department in the past.
Edith Ramirez, who became FTC chairwoman in March, has publicly praised the commission for taking a renewed stand in blocking hospital mergers that the agency says would raise consumer healthcare prices. In particular, she told a crowd of New York attorneys in January that the FTC's Economics Bureau had successfully reinvigorated the commission's approach to hospital mergers, resulting in a string of successful agency actions to block provider consolidations.
“These victories are a perfect fit for consumers already burdened with staggering health care costs,” Ramirez told the New York State Bar Association Law Section members in her Jan. 24 keynote address (PDF).
Since 2011, Gaynor has been chairman of the not-for-profit Health Care Cost Institute in Washington, which maintains a vast database of de-identified healthcare utilization and cost information studied by academics and policymakers.
When the institute was launched, Gaynor recorded a YouTube video that talked about the organization's mission, including his argument that Americans' standard of living has been held flat for 20 years by the rapid rise of healthcare costs. He discussed his interest in physician services, which he said remain opaque to economists in terms of price, quality of care and competitiveness.
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