Hospital mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are one of the most common strategies that health systems use to try to improve performance, despite little evidence to suggest that these alliances are beneficial. Emerging evidence on hospital M&A activity suggests that it does not improve financial performance and leads to lower quality, more expensive care for patients. What is less evident is whether hospital M&A activity has an impact on patient experience. This quasi-experimental study examines seven years (2014-2020) of patient experience data from the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPs) survey, using an inverse probability of treatment weighted (IPTW) difference-in-differences (DID) analysis to compare 312 acquired hospitals to a control group of 4,014 nonfederal general acute care hospitals in the U.S. that were not acquired during the study period. Post-acquisition changes in HCAHPs scores across five domains were measured: communication with nurses; communication with doctors; responsiveness of hospital staff; cleanliness of hospital environment; and overall hospital rating. The study also examines whether there are disparate impacts among hospitals that serve socially vulnerable and rural communities, and whether treatment effects are heterogenous by the type of firm acquiring each treated hospital. with stratified analyses to examine heterogenous treatment effects. Findings suggest there is at least a one percentage point decline in overall hospital rating and a nearly one percentage point decline in staff responsiveness following acquisition. Though treatment effects are not homogenous. Micropolitan hospitals saw larger declines in patient experience scores than metropolitan or rural hospitals, and hospitals in the most vulnerable communities were the least impacted by acquisition. This suggests that patients may be more sensitive to organizational changes when they enjoy better access at baseline. Robustness tests indicate that the downturn in patient experience, while very real, is limited to just the first 1-2 years following acquisition.