Article of the Day: Selections from USpace
I recently came across Prof. John Flynn’s article in USpace: the University of Utah’s Institutional Repository titled “Antitrust policy and health care reform” and thought it might be interesting to showcase given President Obama’s recent speech to Congress on the matter of health care reform. The article, written in 1994 and published in Antitrust Bulletin, “examines case law developments [from 1984-1994] in applying antitrust policy to health care markets and suggests how antitrust policy…relates to legislative proposals for reform of health care markets” (pg. 6).
While Prof. Flynn wrote in the context of the Clinton administration’s health reform policy, antitrust concerns quickly arose in the early days of the Obama administration’s announcement of a new health care policy the details of which included reducing health care costs by means of hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies getting together to agree on strategies for holding down prices http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/health/policy/27health.html
Prof. Flynn argues that “[h]ealth care is an industry that has too long been immune from rigorous review on fundamental legal and economic grounds, a fact for which we are now paying a heavy price in both extensive litigation and a major legislative effort to restructure the entire industry” (pg. 73). The great challenge of health care reform, according to Prof. Flynn, is “[f]inding the right mix of market and regulatory remedies.” It is the kind of challenge “that may well take…decades to resolve in light of the complexities of the issues” (pg. 74).
You can find the full-text of Prof. Flynn’s article in USpace at http://content.lib.utah.edu/u?/ir-main,26706
