This book provides key economic facts, explains the economic concepts needed to examine the implications of these facts, and summarizes the results of empirical studies regarding our healthcare system's access, cost, and quality problems as well as identifying six key trends that are reforming...

Hospitals merge to constrain costs and improve quality. Although hospital consolidation can yield substantial cost and qualitative efficiencies, it can also harm competition by creating market power. Can the agencies and the courts strike the appropriate balance between the quality improvements...

The conventional wisdom in health economics is that idiosyncratic features of the healthcare sector leave little scope for market forces to allocate consumers to higher performance producers. However, we find robust evidence across a variety of conditions and performance measures that higher...