No offense, but this is a very weird article.<p>A little background on group purchasing organizations: GPOs represent their member hospitals. They "buy in bulk" and extract discounts from manufacturers and take "administration fees" to cover theirs costs.<p>Who owns the GPOs? The hospitals do! The largest GPO, Novation, is <i>owned</i> by VHA and UHC, two of the largest healthcare alliances that is comprised of US hospitals.<p>Margaret Clapp, the first author of this article used to work for Mass General who is a member of VHA, who thus owns the GPO Novation.<p>These GPOs <i>exist</i> because the hospitals themselves created them.<p>And it's ridiculous to say that GPO discounts are responsibly for drug shortages. GPOs don't want drug shortages because (1) their member hospitals don't get the drugs they want (2) because the GPO loses money every time a hospital can't order a drug.<p>The current drug shortages are actually due to a number of different factors:<p>(1) Margins on generic drugs are razor thin, they are basically commodities. The purchasers of these drugs don't care who makes them, since they are all deemed equivalent by the FDA; the result is that whoever has the lowest price gets to sell their drug<p>(2) The generic drug market looks like a commodity marketplace, but in fact it isn't. There are a number of costs associated with manufacturing a drug to FDA standards. If the FDA comes in and says "you can't ship that drug", you've probably just lost all of your profits for an entire year.<p>(3) Drug prices are "sticky" due to the way that Medicare and Medicaid pays for drugs. If you suddenly have a manufacturing problem and need to raise the price of your drug to cover costs, you're out of luck since it means the purchasers of your drug will lose money.<p>(4) Because of the low profit margins, companies are simply getting out of the business. There are other products they could sell that are lower-risk and higher margin.