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Full-Text Articles in Contracts

Why Don't Doctors & Lawyers (Strangers In The Night) Get Their Act Together?, Frances H. Miller May 2004

Why Don't Doctors & Lawyers (Strangers In The Night) Get Their Act Together?, Frances H. Miller

Michigan Law Review

Health care in America is an expensive, complicated, inefficient, tangled mess - everybody says so. Patients decry its complexity, health care executives bemoan its lack of coherence, physicians plead for universal coverage to simplify their lives so they can just get on with taking care of patients, and everyone complains about health care costs. The best health care in the world is theoretically available here, but we deliver and pay for it in some of the world's worst ways. Occam's razor ("Among competing hypotheses, favor the simplest one") is of little help here. There are no simple hypotheses - everything …


Medical Malpractice And Contract Disclosure: An Equilibrium Model Of The Effects Of Legal Rules On Behavior In Health Care Markets, Kathryn Zeiler Apr 2004

Medical Malpractice And Contract Disclosure: An Equilibrium Model Of The Effects Of Legal Rules On Behavior In Health Care Markets, Kathryn Zeiler

Faculty Scholarship

This paper develops a theoretical model of how specific legal rules affect the types of contracts managed care organizations ("MCOs") use to compensate physicians. In addition, the analysis provides insights into how physician treatment decisions and the rate of medical malpractice lawsuits react to different legal rules. In particular, the model predicts that outcomes in jurisdictions forcing MCOs to disclose physician contract terms to patients differ from those that do not. Contracts vary depending on the disclosure rule and how treatment costs relate to expected damages and litigation costs. Moreover, the model predicts that jurisdictions forcing contract disclosure observe higher …