Antitrust, competition, and health care reform.

Commentary - Competition Policy after Health Care Reform: Mending Holes in Antitrust Law's Protective Net.

Antitrust law has been characterized as godfather to competition in health care, as landmark cases removed professional restraints of trade and challenged anticompetitive joint ventures and networks that had inhibited market approaches. More recently, antitrust may seem more like an absentee father, as unchecked consolidation over the past fifteen years resulted in markets with dominant provide...

Getting the product right: how competition policy can improve health care markets.

As hospital, physician, and health insurance markets consolidate and change in response to health care reform, some commentators have called for vigorous enforcement of the federal antitrust laws to prevent the acquisition and exercise of market power. In health care, however, stricter antitrust enforcement will benefit consumers only if it accounts for the competitive distortions caused by the...

Antitrust enforcement in the medical services industry: what does it all mean?

Before 1975, federal antitrust authorities neglected the health care sector, thereby allowing the entrenchment of many anticompetitive practices and institutions that seemed not only "natural," but also beneficial to the quality and professionalism of doctor-patient relations. While antitrust enforcement shares the usual physician preference for free enterprise, prosecutorial discretion is ofte...

Health care reform and competing visions of medical care: antitrust and state provider cooperation legislation.

This Article examines the competing visions of medical care represented by the professional paradigm and the market-based economic paradigm and considers the implications of those visions for the development of public policy. The first Part identifies the premises underlying the professional model and the influences that have bolstered each model. Notably, application of antitrust law to the he...

Antitrust policy and real health care reform.