With fall comes sweeping change—and the health care price and competition fields were no exception this year. September’s literature focused most heavily on: 1) health care and insurance competition|2) pharmaceutical drug pricing|and 3) Medicare/Medicare Advantage. Health care and insurance competition took center stage in September. Subcommittees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committees held multiple hearings on various competition topics. Numerous stakeholder representatives testified at each hearing—including, as you’ve probably already heard, The Source’s very own Executive Editor, Jaime King! Each of the witnesses’ Prepared Statements from […]

While April brought us little in the way of showers, it did offer a nice range of articles and reports that focus on competition in health care markets and payment reform initiatives, including accountable care organizations (ACOs). This issue of the Roundup will tackle payment reform initiatives first, then move on to competition, and wrap up with a handful of articles examining state initiatives and opportunities. Payment Reform Initiatives The April academic literature examined the ability of payment reform initiatives, including payment for performance, reference pricing, and provider risk sharing […]

By Guest Blogger: Erin C. Fuse Brown, JD, MPH We are pleased to publish another excellent post by Professor Fuse Brown, originally published here by the Center for Law, Health & Society! The post: Last month, Slate columnist Reihan Salam wrote a provocative article about outrageous hospital prices that are driven, according to Salam, by greed, avarice, and market power. Salam gets a few things dead right, namely his diagnosis that we have a massive hospital pricing problem that is bleeding us dry and that the problem is largely caused by growing hospital market power. However, he misses the […]

It’s been a big month in health law! King v. Burwell was argued before the Supreme Court, the House voted to repeal the sustainable growth rate (SGR), a two-year CHIP extension was passed, and the Supreme Court held that physicians did not have the right to sue state Medicaid programs for greater reimbursements in Armstrong v. Exceptional Child Center. While you were busy reading about these and countless other developments in our ever changing healthcare system, quite a bit has been published related to healthcare prices and competition. This month’s […]

Happy Halloween! October’s roundup focuses on articles examining hospital pricing as well as the new trend toward reference pricing. We’ll also take a peek at a couple of articles on hospital consolidation. Nothing too scary here! Let’s start with hospital pricing. Erin Fuse Brown, Associate Professor at Georgia State University College of Law, published Irrational Hospital Pricing in the Houston Journal of Health Law and Policy earlier this month. Fuse Brown demonstrates the deep irrationality found in most hospital’s chargemaster charges, and then responds to the numerous claims that hospital […]