As healthcare markets continue to consolidate and prices continue to rise, economists, legal scholars, antitrust enforcers, and policymakers have the opportunity and obligation to examine how the dynamics of our healthcare markets have changed over time and how those changes affect consumers and...

This report examines the California AG’s existing merger oversight authority, compares that to theauthority held by other state AGs, and then offers a series of considerations for policymakers interested in ensuring that California’s health care markets operate in a more consumer-friendly manner

Antitrust enforcers are taking a second look at vertical mergers as a large body of theoretical and empirical work has undermined the economic foundations of the laissez-faire approach that has characterized government policies over the last thirty years. Health care markets, which exhibit many...

The policy community, albeit belatedly, now fully recognizes the economic dangers of highly concentrated healthcare markets. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and states continue to closely scrutinize hospital mergers. Recent successes by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in challenging...

Following a string of government losses in cases challenging hospital mergers in federal court, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice issued their report on competition in health care seeking to set the record straight on a number of issues that underlie the judiciary's...

Of the many elements animating structural change under health reform, Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) have drawn the greatest attention. The ACO strategy entails regulatory interventions that at once aim to reshape the health care delivery system, improve outcomes, promote adoption of...

In the run-up to its enactment, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) elicited howls of protest from opponents who claimed the federal government was, “taking over,” the American healthcare system, “micromanaging,” medicine, and generally exposing the nation to the bête...

A central challenge for all health care reform proposals currently being discussed is finding the means to effectively channel market forces given many deeply embedded features of our system and the peculiar economics of health care delivery and financing. This essay traces the path of...