Law Commons^™

The Irony Of Health Care’S Public Option, Allison K. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

The idea of a public health insurance option is at least a half century old, but has not yet had its day in the limelight. This chapter explains why if that moment ever comes, health care’s public option will fall short of expectations that it will provide a differentiated, meaningful alternative to private health insurance and will spur health insurance competition.

Health care’s public option bubbled up in its best-known form in California in the early 2000s and got increasing mainstream attention in the lead up to the 2010 health reform, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). The …

The Post-Chicago Antitrust Revolution: A Retrospective, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

A symposium examining the contributions of the post-Chicago School provides an appropriate opportunity to offer some thoughts on both the past and the future of antitrust. This afterword reviews the excellent papers with an eye toward appreciating the contributions and limitations of both the Chicago School, in terms of promoting the consumer welfare standard and embracing price theory as the preferred mode of economic analysis, and the post-Chicago School, with its emphasis on game theory and firm-level strategic conduct. It then explores two emerging trends, specifically neo-Brandeisian advocacy for abandoning consumer welfare as the sole goal of antitrust and the …

Anticompetitive Mergers In Labor Markets, Ioana Marinescu, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Mergers of competitors are conventionally challenged under the federal antitrust laws when they threaten to lessen competition in some product or service market in which the merging firms sell. Mergers can also injure competition in markets where the firms purchase. Although that principle is widely recognized, very few litigated cases have applied merger law to buyers. This article concerns an even more rarefied subset, and one that has barely been mentioned. Nevertheless, its implications are staggering. Some mergers may be unlawful because they injure competition in the labor market by enabling the post-merger firm anticompetitively to suppress wages or salaries. …

Is There A Role For Common Carriage In An Internet-Based World?, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

During the course of the network neutrality debate, advocates have proposed extending common carriage regulation to broadband Internet access services. Others have endorsed extending common carriage to a wide range of other Internet-based services, including search engines, cloud computing, Apple devices, online maps, and social networks. All too often, however, those who focus exclusively on the Internet era pay too little attention to the lessons of the legacy of regulated industries, which has long struggled to develop a coherent rationale for determining which industries should be subject to common carriage. Of the four rationales for determining the scope of common …