By their nature, the recent antitrust cases scrutinizing the two proposed health insurance mega-mergers -- Anthem with Cigna and Aetna with Humana -- focused on narrow definitions of specific markets and the likely static impact on prices. But the antitrust proceedings omitted a broader...

Objectives: To develop an effective legal mechanism to combat chargemaster abuses and to facilitate price transparency.Study Design: Applying legal doctrines to out-of-network (OON) billing disputes.Methods: We reviewed rudimentary contract law and examined the law's handling of contracts where...

Accountable care organizations (ACOs) were the cornerstone of the novel payment strategies for Medicare reform under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACO initiative was intended as an experiment in health policy, and according to recent findings, the experiment so far has failed to produce...

Recent discussions in health reform circles have pinned great hopes on the prospect of innovation as the solution to the high-cost, inadequate-quality U.S. health system. But U.S. health care institutions - insurers, providers, and specialists - have ceded leadership in innovation to Indian...

U.S. hospitals and physicians regularly charge uninsured patients and patients receiving care outside their health-plan networks far more what most health insurers pay and far more than their actual costs. Such practices have triggered over 100 lawsuits and prompted calls for pricing...

In Stateless Commerce, Barak Richman uses the diamond industry to explore how ethnic trading networks operate and why they persist in the twenty-first century. How, for example, does the Forty-Seventh Street diamond district in midtown Manhattan--surrounded by skyscrapers and sophisticated...

In Stateless Commerce, Barak Richman uses the colorful case study of the diamond industry to explore how ethnic trading networks operate and why they persist in the twenty-first century. How, for example, does the 47th Street diamond district in midtown Manhattan—surrounded by skyscrapers and...

Background Disclosure of authors' financial interests has been proposed as a strategy for protecting the integrity of the biomedical literature. We examined whether authors' financial interests were disclosed consistently in articles on coronary stents published in 2006. Methodology/Principal...