Dana Gibbon was 18 weeks pregnant with her first baby when her OB-GYN told her at an appointment that she wouldn’t be her doctor anymore.

OB-GYN services were ending at the clinic in Corvallis, a college town of 60,000 in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The doctor said all of the Corvallis Clinic’s OB-GYNs were resigning.

“We have appreciated the opportunity to participate in your care and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause,” the clinic said in a subsequent letter to patients.

The closure of the Corvallis OB-GYN practice came two years after a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest health insurance company, bought the clinic. The subsidiary, Optum Oregon, cited a national shortage of physicians that made it hard to replace doctors who left and increased the workload for those who remained.

Gibbon frantically looked for another doctor. Friends recommended two other obstetrics practices, but both had closed. Gibbon settled on a small hospital close to home with four dedicated maternity beds — all of which were full when she was due to deliver in April, delaying her induction three times. Her healthy baby boy was eventually born on April 29 by cesarean section, a procedure she’d hoped to avoid.

“It’s impossible not to wonder if things may have gone differently if there had been more labor and delivery beds in the area,” she said.

Corvallis patients like Gibbon faced this disruption despite a unique Oregon law intended to prevent it.

In 2021, the state became the first in the country to give its state health department the broad power to block acquisitions and mergers of hospitals, hospices and medical practices, an effort to counteract the consolidation that research shows is cutting competition and driving up costs nationwide.

Lawmakers said Oregon’s novel oversight power would stop multibillion-dollar deals from reducing care and increasing costs. State regulators got the authority to reject transactions or to add conditions and levy fines if companies disregarded them. The law was hailed as a national model.

Five years later, Oregon has not formally blocked a single transaction or issued any fines. While the new oversight is credited with leading to the withdrawal of two high-profile transactions — a merger of two Portland-area hospital systems and the acquisition of a nonprofit that provides Medicaid benefits to half a million Oregonians — some people who supported the law say it has not been nearly as effective as hoped.

Dr. John Santa, a retired physician and former member of the Oregon Health Policy Board, which oversees the state agency responsible for implementing the new law, said his interactions with the program were “so disappointing and fell so short of what I expected. I never imagined it would perform as poorly as it has.”

Of the nine healthcare deals for which regulators have done follow-up reviews, at least three had outcomes the law was meant to forestall, ProPublica’s examination of state records found.

UnitedHealth Group acquired a home health provider, LHC Group, for $5.4 billion in 2023. It shuttered a rural hospice agency in Central Oregon two months later, funneling staff and patients to a location nearly 30 miles away. The state later said the move raised concerns about a potential reduction in access. A UnitedHealth spokesperson said the closure did not reduce services because patients and staff were reassigned and it continued to serve the same areas.

After Amazon bought One Medical for $3.9 billion that same year, it closed the group’s downtown Portland practice while cutting $100 million in operating expenses nationwide. It saw a drop in Oregon patient satisfaction scores, as measured by an outside group, a state review noted. Amazon declined to comment on the One Medical deal.

Oregon in 2022 approved the acquisition of a hospice provider by a private equity firm, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. The firm told regulators that it........

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