Designing Hospital Antitrust Policy to Promote Social Welfare
31 Pages Posted: 10 Feb 1999
There are 3 versions of this paper
Designing Hospital Antitrust Policy to Promote Social Welfare
Designing Hospital Antitrust Policy to Promote Social Welfare
Designing Hospital Antitrust Policy to Promote Social Welfare
Date Written: January 1999
Abstract
Applying principles of merger evaluation to the health care industry in general, and to hospital markets in particular, poses several unique challenges. Definition of relevant geographic markets and assessment of the consequences of changes in competition for patient and social welfare are complicated by asymmetric information and moral hazard due to health insurance. We suggest a new empirical approach to assessing the impact of hospital competition which addresses the shortcomings of existing methods. We then summarize our main results on the welfare consequences of competition. We conclude with an illustration of how our methods can be used to assess the welfare implications of specific hospital mergers, and with some implications of our findings for antitrust policy.
JEL Classification: I11, I12, L44
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Competition in Health Care Markets
By Martin Gaynor and Robert J. Town
-
Antitrust and Competition in Health Care Markets
By Martin Gaynor and William B. Vogt
-
Antitrust and Competition in Health Care Markets
By Martin Gaynor and William B. Vogt
-
Change, Consolidation, and Competition in Health Care Markets
By Martin Gaynor and Deborah Haas-wilson
-
Change, Consolidation, and Competition in Health Care Markets
By Martin Gaynor and Deborah Haas-wilson
-
Are Invisible Hands Good Hands? Moral Hazard, Competition, and the 2nd Best in Health Care Markets
By Martin Gaynor, Deborah Haas-wilson, ...
-
By Martin Gaynor, Deborah Haas-wilson, ...
-
By Martin Gaynor and William B. Vogt
-
By Martin Gaynor and William B. Vogt