Healthcare in the United States is the most expensive in the world, with real per capita spending growth averaging 4 percent since 1980. This paper examines the role of market power of U.S. healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies. It finds that markups (the ability to charge prices...

Healthcare in the United States is the most expensive in the world, with real per capita spending growth averaging 4 percent since 1980. This paper examines the role of market power of U.S. healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies. It finds that markups (the ability to charge prices...

From a practical perspective, the paper demonstrates that the appropriate use of dispersion, population, and equity criteria can lead to fairly good solutions with respect to the p-median objective. The only stipulation is that the decision maker verifies (through simple constraint checks) that...