PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

David A Hyman

Publications and source records attributed to David A Hyman.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

Subsidizing health care providers through the tax code: status or conduct?

The merits of tax exemption for nonprofit health care providers have been hotly debated for decades. Mark Schlesinger and Brad Gray provide a useful, dispassionate meta-analysis of past research; they conclude that there are real differences in the performance of nonprofit and for-profit hospitals and nursing homes, although they vary along several key dimensions. Unfortunately, their findings offer no insight on whether these differences are large enough to justify a sizable subsidy and whether it makes more sense to use an undifferentiated subsidy tied to status (current practice), or a graduated subsidy tied to quantifiable and objective measures of performance.

Community-Institutional Relations↗

Five reasons why health care quality research hasn't affected competition law and policy.

Research on health care quality has become increasingly sophisticated, but the research has not had a major impact on competition law and policy. Five specific translational barriers (relevance/litigation dynamics, complexity, framing, judicial and administrative skepticism, and inadequate demand) are identified. If researchers on health care quality want to have an impact on competition law and policy they must confront and overcome these translational barriers.

Antitrust Laws↗

Why competition law matters to health care quality.

Competition law (encompassing both antitrust and consumer protection) is the forgotten stepchild of health care quality. This paper introduces readers to competition law and policy, describes its institutional features and analytic framework, surveys the ways in which competition law has influenced quality-based competition, and outlines some areas in need of further development. Competition law protects the competitive process--not individual competitors. It guides the structural features of the health care system and the conduct of providers as they navigate it. Competition law does not privilege quality over other competitive goals but honors consumers' preferences with respect to trade-offs among quality, price, and other attributes of goods and services.

Antitrust Laws↗

Monopoly, monopsony, and market definition: an antitrust perspective on market concentration among health insurers.

James Robinson uses the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) to compute the concentration of commercial health insurance markets in most of the states during the past four years. The HHI is the analytical foundation for the federal antitrust merger guidelines, so we consider his findings from an antitrust perspective. Market concentration provides an important benchmark for antitrust analysis, but it does not, standing alone, indicate the presence of problematic (anticompetitive) behavior or a problem that antitrust law can solve. Even if it did, there are major problems in treating individual states as discrete insurance markets. Unless the market is correctly defined, any analysis of market concentration is thoroughly unreliable.

Antitrust Laws↗