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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Virtues Of Medicare, Jill R. Horwitz
The Virtues Of Medicare, Jill R. Horwitz
Reviews
Most of us look forward to a heaven where people don't get sick. But if they do, health care would be traded among fully informed patients and providers in perfectly competitive and frictionless markets. In that perfect world, sick citizens simply shop for doctors the way they shop for other consumer goods. The better doctors, like the most elegant hotel rooms and fanciest cars, would cost more than inferior doctors. Patients would consult their utility meters and, with appropriate attention to discounting over an infinite lifetime, choose accordingly. After each treatment, the patients would know the quality of their outcome …
Patients As Consumers: Courts, Cotnracts, And The New Medical Marketplace, Mark A. Hall, Carl E. Schneider
Patients As Consumers: Courts, Cotnracts, And The New Medical Marketplace, Mark A. Hall, Carl E. Schneider
Michigan Law Review
The persistent riddle of health-care policy is how to control the costs while improving the quality of care. The riddle's oncepromising answer-managed care-has been politically ravaged, and consumerist solutions are now winning favor This Article examines the legal condition of the patient-as-consumer in today's health-care market. It finds that insurers bargain with some success for rates for the people they insure. The uninsured, however, must contract to pay whatever a provider charges and then are regularly charged prices that are several times insurers'pricesa nd providers' actual costs. Perhaps because they do not understand the healthcare market, courts generally enforce these …