Health Policy Analysis: Antitrust Law and Regulation on Health Care Providers

Antitrust policy and real health care reform.

Incorporating health care quality into health antitrust law

BACKGROUND Antitrust authorities treat price as a proxy for hospital quality since health care quality is difficult to observe. As the ability to measure quality improved, more research became necessary to investigate the relationship between hospital market power and patient outcomes. This paper examines the impact of hospital competition on the quality of care as measured by the risk-adjusted...

Antitrust enforcement encourages health care providers to cooperate procompetitively.

A review of significant administrative and judicial rulings in antitrust law during 1993 shows that the antitrust laws should not impede innovative, cost-cutting cooperative arrangements among providers, so long as their actual or potential procompetitive benefits are not outweighed by their anticompetitive effects.

Economic analysis in health care antitrust.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC or Commission) has been very active in enforcing antitrust laws in the health care field for the past two decades. The staff has investigated a wide variety of cases covering a broad range of restrictions on competition. These cases can be divided into three basic types of cases in health care: (1) mergers and acquisitions, (2) horizontal restraints cases or ag...

Introduction: Antitrust and Health Care

Health care markets and related sectors of the economy like insurance provide essential services in our society. They have been undergoing rapid change for at least the past decade, yet some thirtyseven to thirty-nine million citizens lack health care insurance at one time or another each year; rapid inflation of costs has more often been the case than not; and equal access to the system for bo...