To improve health care market dynamics and reduce costs, many states have passed legislation to improve transparency in health care for consumers, regulators, and employers. Significant state-led initiatives include building price transparency tools using data from state all-payer claims...

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...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act created a new set of rules for nonprofit hospitals to maintain their federal tax-exemption, codified at Section 501(r) of the Internal Revenue Code. The 501(r) rules attempt to address the problem of hospitals’ excessive prices and onerous debt...

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....

Hospital prices are almost completely irrational. They bear no relationship to the cost of providing the services, they are opaque, and the prices vary wildly among hospitals and payers. The craziness of hospital pricing was laid bare when the federal government released data on hospital charges...

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...

Mental health courts divert mentally ill offenders from the criminal justice system into court-ordered treatment. Since their creation a decade ago, mental health courts have continued to change court policies, practices and services to improve participant success. This article first argues that...