Health care consolidation in the United States has been widespread at all levels and across all entities. This consolidation has extended beyond horizontal mergers of hospitals or other providers to include out-of-market mergers, or cross-market mergers. Cross-market mergers include the merger...

The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) signature accomplishment was the creation of a statutory right to health care for the uninsured. The ambition and the degree of societal and political debate leading up to the Act’s passage suggests it is a “superstatute,” a rare breed of statute that...

Lawsuits against hospitals and other health care entities alleging liability for patient harms are brought and settled routinely in the United States. However, the settlement by health care giant Tenet Healthcare, on the eve of trial on March 23, 2011, in Preston v Tenet Healthsystem Memorial...

There are inadequate consumer protections from harmful medical billing practices that result in unavoidable, unexpected, and often financially devastating medical bills. The problem stems from increasing cost shifting to patients underway in American health care and the inordinate complexity...

Private equity has rapidly entered the health care sector, expanding its investment targets from hospitals and nursing facilities to physician practices. The incursion of private equity is the latest manifestation of a long trend toward the corporatization and financialization of medicine....

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) reflected a significant philosophical shift in the United States from distributing costs associated with sickness based on the principle of actuarial fairness toward a social solidarity principle premised on the “goals of mutual aid and support.”[i] Yet four...

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

As policymakers pursue the Triple Aim of reducing costs, improving quality, and expanding access, the development of an All-Payer Claims Database (APCD) can provide invaluable information about the drivers of cost, the value of health care interventions, and the efficacy of policy initiatives....

The United States currently spends more than any other nation on healthcare, as a percentage of gross domestic product and per capita. Our healthcare markets suffer from high levels of consolidation, a lack of clear price and quality signals for consumers, and an inability to access price,...

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...