Sam Baker reports, House Democrats reintroduced a bill Tuesday that would revoke the health insurance industry’s exemption from antitrust laws — a liberal priority that
There’s vastly more economics literature on the effects of hospital market power than physician market power. So, the working paper by Abe Dunn and Adam Hale
I said this more than a year ago about my concern with the ACA and ACOs: Moreover, this still doesn’t address the real problem that
I’m pleased to announce that Aaron and I will be posting several times a month on the AcademyHealth blog. My first post appears today. It’s
This is a FAQ entry. See the main FAQ index for others. How insurance functions like bulk purchasing, achieving discounts on volume If insurers suffer cost shifting, they
In recent weeks, I’ve noticed the reemergence of the question of why people insure for relatively low cost, predictable health expenditures. This has come up
For reasons not worth explaining, I have to write most posts in advance. After writing this one and inserting it in the queue, Uwe Reinhardt
Lack of hospital competition is often blamed for increases in hospital prices and health care spending. A reader asked me if increasing competition among hospitals
For a few weeks now, I’ve been enjoying the content at the Altarum Institute’s HealthPolicyForum.org, some of it from long ago, as it turns out. Last
Last week, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a report that examined the competitiveness of the individual and small-group insurance markets by state. Not surprisingly, they
In its 2011 Report to Congress (pdf), MedPAC makes some points I made in my cost shifting paper published the same month (ungated working paper version available). The following chart, from the
A long post on important topics: Medicare hospital payments, private hospital prices, hospital costs, and market power. In the third chapter of its 2011 Report
