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Insurance Law Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Insurance Law

The First Liability Insurance Cartel In America, 1896-1906, Sachin S. Pandya Jun 2011

The First Liability Insurance Cartel In America, 1896-1906, Sachin S. Pandya

Faculty Articles and Papers

This article studies the rise and fall of the first liability insurance cartel in the United States. In 1886, insurance companies in America began selling liability insurance for personal injury accidents, primarily to cover business tort liability for employee accidents at work and non-employee injuries occasioned by their business operations. In 1896, the leading liability insurers agreed to fix premium rates and share information on policyholder losses. In 1906, this cartel fell apart. Although largely forgotten until now, the rise and fall of this cartel confirms the expectations of both cartel theory and past studies of insurance cartels, largely in …


Competition And Regulation In The Insurance Sector: Reassessing The Mccarran-Ferguson Act, Susan Beth Farmer Jan 2011

Competition And Regulation In The Insurance Sector: Reassessing The Mccarran-Ferguson Act, Susan Beth Farmer

Journal Articles

This article was presented at a symposium entitled “Public and Private: Are the Boundaries in Transition?” sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute on June 24, 2010. It proposes a different paradigm, which more precisely describes regulation and competition in the insurance sector. This relationship is the shifting boundary between state and federal regulation instead of a boundary between the public and private sectors. The McCarran-Ferguson Act was adopted to protect firms acting in the business of insurance from federal antitrust scrutiny, but its language and impact goes far beyond federal competition law. So broad is the exemption that the modern …


The Provider-Monopoly Problem In Health Care, Clark C. Havighurst, Barak D. Richman Jan 2011

The Provider-Monopoly Problem In Health Care, Clark C. Havighurst, Barak D. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

Although federal judges have resisted giving due effect to standard antitrust principles in scrutinizing mergers of nonprofit hospitals, the presence of health insurance makes it especially important to oppose monopoly in health services markets. U.S.-style health insurance gives monopolist providers extraordinary pricing freedom, thus exacerbating monopoly’s usual redistributive effects. Significant allocative inefficiencies - albeit not the kind generally associated with monopoly - also result when the monopolist is a nonprofit hospital. Because it is probably impossible to undo past hospital mergers creating undue market power, we suggest some alternative remedies. One is to apply antitrust rules against "tying" arrangements so …