Law Commons^™

How Liability Insurers Protect Patients And Improve Safety, Tom Baker, Charles Silver

All Faculty Scholarship

Forty years after the publication of the first systematic study of adverse medical events, there is greater access to information about adverse medical events and increasingly widespread acceptance of the view that patient safety requires more than vigilance by well-intentioned medical professionals. In this essay, we describe some of the ways that medical liability insurance organizations contributed to this transformation, and we catalog the roles that those organizations play in promoting patient safety today. Whether liability insurance in fact discourages providers from improving safety or encourages them to protect patients from avoidable harms is an empirical question that a survey …

Racial Disparities In Accessing Health Care And Health Status, Ruqaiijah Yearby

All Faculty Scholarship

Point (Overview): Interpersonal and institutional racial biases are the principal reasons for racial disparities in accessing health care and disparities in African Americans’ health status, which can only be addressed by acknowledging and putting an end to interpersonal and institutional racial bias in the health care system that adversely affects the health status African-Americans.

Counterpoint (Overview): The irrational structure of health care, which is based on ability to pay, rather than need is the main cause of racial disparities in health, which will not be equalized until the structure of the health care system is fixed or when African Americans’ …

Antitrust & Hospital Mergers: Does The Nonprofit Form Affect Competitive Substance?, Thomas L. Greaney

All Faculty Scholarship

Following a string of government losses in cases challenging hospital mergers in federal court, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice issued their report on competition in health care seeking to set the record straight on a number of issues that underlie the judiciary's resolution of these cases. One such issue is the import of nonprofit status for applying antitrust law. This essay describes antitrust's role in addressing the consolidation in the hospital sector and the subtle influence that the social function of the nonprofit hospital has had in merger litigation. Noting that the political and social context …

Mission, Margin, And Trust In The Nonprofit Health Care Enterprise, Thomas L. Greaney, Kathleen Boozang

All Faculty Scholarship

The law governing charitable corporations remains neglected and thoroughly muddled. Still unsettled are central issues regarding the accountability of directors and management, legal standards governing organic changes by nonprofit institutions, and mechanisms to ensure fidelity to the organization's charitable mission. For nonprofit corporations in the health care sector, which represent a large proportion of all health services supplied nationwide, particularly charity care, these shortcomings have had serious repercussions. The central issue addressed in this Article is how fidelity to the mission of the charitable health care corporation should be monitored. It advances the normative perspective that the law should maximize …

Night Landings On An Aircraft Carrier: Hospital Mergers And Antitrust Law, Thomas L. Greaney

All Faculty Scholarship

Abstract: Analysis of the competitive effects of hospital mergers requires antitrust tribunals to make exceedingly fine-tuned appraisals of complex economic relationships. The law requires fact finding in a number of complex areas, e.g., defining product and geographic markets, predicting the possibility of that firms will engage in coordinated behavior; and assessing efficiencies flowing from the merger. Further complicating the process is the fact that these decisions require judgments regarding what the future may hold in an industry undergoing revolutionary change. Like pilots landing at night aboard an aircraft carrier, courts are aiming for a target that is small, shifting and …