Law Commons^™

Regulating For Efficiency In Health Care Through The Antitrust Laws, Thomas L. Greaney

All Faculty Scholarship

The need to evaluate the competitive consequences of cooperation among rivals has long posed a dilemma for antitrust enforcement. Collaboration can reduce rivalry, raise prices and otherwise reduce consumer welfare; at the same time cooperation among rivals carries the promise of creating cost savings, correcting market failures and producing other benefits. In many cases antitrust doctrine requires a balancing of the positive and negative effects of coordination. In health care, federal antitrust enforcement agencies have increasingly turned to regulatory tools including policy statements, advisory opinions, speeches and regulatory decrees settling cases to strike this balance. However, the agencies have paid …

Managed Care As Regulation: Functional Ethics For A Regulated Environment, Sandra H. Johnson

All Faculty Scholarship

Institutional context plays a substantive role in ethical analysis. Accordingly, efforts to apply the principles of bioethics generally and without regard for institutional context may prove difficult.

This article first addresses the aspects of two non-hospital settings - the managed care organization (MCO) and the nursing home - that make the application of hospital-derived principles of bioethics particularly difficult.

The article then considers health care providers’ complaints that extensive MCO regulations impede ethical decisionmaking and adequate care. MCO standards and regulations are value-based. Thus after identifying four categories of providers’ MCO complaints, this article evaluates the complaints under ethical norms. …