Abstract: The US health care industry has undergone considerable consolidation, with mergers and acquisitions happening amongst health insurers, pharmaceutical companies and hospitals. Although there have been mergers in the pharmaceutical and insurance sectors, this paper will focus only on the impact that hospital mergers have had. With the trend all but continuing, various arguments for and against hospital mergers have been propounded, with different points of view on the net effects that hospital mergers have had. The main concerns of both sides is the impact that hospital mergers have had on price, quality of patient care and hospital efficiency. In this article, we find that the impact of hospital mergers on these indices has been mixed as there is no predictable effect that hospital mergers will definitely have. Indeed, it appears that the impact of a hospital merger is specific to the degree of hospital consolidation in the region where the hospitals operate, the market share of each partner to the merger, and how good they are in terms of quality of care prior to the merger.