Health Care in Federal Systems

Federal Mandates in the Health Care Context

FEDERAL AntitRust EnFoRcEmEnt in HEALtH cARE

In previous Expert Voices essays, William Vogt, Austin Frakt and James Robinson discussed consolidation in hospital markets and cited a large and growing literature that finds a direct correlation between consolidation and hospital prices, with at best mixed evidence of improved quality. All three essayists suggested that the Federal Trade Commission must do more to limit anticompetitive consol...

What Distinguishes Preventive Medicine from Preventive Health Care in Health Care Systems?

Letter to Editor

Federal prosecution of health care fraud.

Volume 94 No. 9 September 2011 was sentenced to168 months in prison and ordered to pay $9.5 million in restitution for his part in the five-year long scheme. In December, the parent company of two New Jersey hospitals paid $7.9 million to resolve allegations that the hospitals wrongfully obtained excessive outlier payments. In March of 2010, a cancer center in Florida agreed to pay $12 million ...

Fiscal Shenanigans, Targeted Federal Health Care Funds,

We explore the effectiveness of matching grants when lower levels of government can expropriate some of the funds for other uses. Using data on the Medicaid Disproportionate Share program, we identify states that were most able to expropriate funds. Payments to public hospitals in these states were systematically diverted and had no significant impact on patient mortality. Payments that were no...