The health care industry continues to undergo unprecedented consolidation. Health care providers and payors alike have pursued a wide variety of integrative strategies to achieve efficiencies or other business advantages. The Health Care Mergers and Acquisitions Handbook is designed to educate the practitioner about the antitrust analysis of mergers and acquisitions within the health care industry. Over the past two decades there has been an extraordinary amount of litigation related to challenges of hospital mergers. Each chapter identifies and analyzes important antitrust issues governing such consolidations. Accordingly, the first several chapters are devoted to a detailed treatment of substantive issues peculiar to such mergers: an introduction to hospital merger litigation, describing trends in litigation and the way in which such mergers are analyzed; issues unique to market definition, including product market definition and geographic market definition; the competitive effects of hospital mergers, assessing the evidence necessary to establish a prima facie case in a merger challenge and the rebuttal arguments offered by merging parties; a unique rebuttal argument offered by merging hospitals that is treated separately due to its prominent role in hospital merger litigation - the role and significance of efficiencies in determining the competitive merits of such mergers; the potential applicability of the state action doctrine to hospital mergers. In addition to a substantive treatment of hospital mergers, the Handbook also addresses; combinations of health care management organizations (HMOs) and physician practice groups; the analysis used by the enforcement agencies when reviewing mergers of HMOs; antitrust issues posed by physician practice consolidations. The appendix contains a chart summarizing litigated hospital mergers.--

The most complete and up-to-date single-volume reference on health care antitrust law.

A comprehensive review of U.S. substantive merger law, this book gives you indispensable guidance you can put into practice today.

A balanced proposal that protects both a patient's access to care and a physician's ability to refuse to provide certain services for reasons of conscience. Physicians in the United States who refuse to perform a variety of legally permissible medical services because of their own moral objections are often protected by “conscience clauses.” These laws, on the books in nearly every state since the legalization of abortion by Roe v. Wade, shield physicians and other health professionals from such potential consequences of refusal as liability and dismissal. While some praise conscience clauses as protecting important freedoms, opponents, concerned with patient access to care, argue that professional refusals should be tolerated only when they are based on valid medical grounds. In Conflicts of Conscience in Health Care, Holly Fernandez Lynch finds a way around the polarizing rhetoric associated with this issue by proposing a compromise that protects both a patient's access to care and a physician's ability to refuse. This focus on compromise is crucial, as new uses of medical technology expand the controversy beyond abortion and contraception to reach an increasing number of doctors and patients. Lynch argues that doctor-patient matching on the basis of personal moral values would eliminate, or at least minimize, many conflicts of conscience, and suggests that state licensing boards facilitate this goal. Licensing boards would be responsible for balancing the interests of doctors and patients by ensuring a sufficient number of willing physicians such that no physician's refusal leaves a patient entirely without access to desired medical services. This proposed solution, Lynch argues, accommodates patients' freedoms while leaving important room in the profession for individuals who find some of the capabilities of medical technology to be ethically objectionable.

Market driven healthcare is massively divisive. Opponents argue that a competition approach to medical treatment negatively impacts on quality, while advocates point to increased efficiencies. This book casts a critical eye over both positions to show that the concerns over quality are in fact real. Taking a two part approach, it unveils the fault lines along which healthcare provision and the pursuit of quality would in certain cases clash. It then shows how competition authorities can only effectively assess competition concerns when they ask the fundamental question of how the concept of healthcare quality should be defined and factored into their decisions. Drawing on UK, US and EU examples, it explores antitrust and merger cases in hospital, medical and health insurance markets to give an accurate depiction of the reality and challenges of regulating competition in healthcare provision.

Research in Health Economics has developed into a separate discipline for the last 25 years. All this intense research activity, has translated in the inclusion of courses of health economics, mostly at graduate level. However, the Industrial Organization aspects of the health care market do not occupy a central place in those courses. We propose a textbook of health economics whose distinguishing feature is the analysis of the health care market from an Industrial Organization perspective. This textbook will provide teachers and students with a reference to study the market structure aspects of the health care sector. The book is structured in three parts. The first part will present the basic principles of economics. It will bring all readers to the required level of knowledge to follow subsequent parts. Part II will review the main concepts of health economics. The third part will contain the core of the book. It will present the industrial organization analysis of the health care market, based on our own research.

A complete resource, this handbook presents current knowledge on concepts and methods of human factors and ergonomics, and their applications to help improve quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness in patient care. It provides specific information on how to analyze medical errors with the fundamental goal to reduce such errors and the harm t

The Bank Merger and Acquisitions Handbook is a how-to manual for lawyers who must analyze a potential transaction or who are faced with an agency review of the competitive effects of a proposed transaction that would combine banking institutions. Its focus is practical; complementing the Antitrust Section's other publications on merger review including Mergers and Acquisitions, and the Premerger Notification Practice Manual. This book addresses those aspects of bank merger review that are unique to banking institutions - such as the statutory framework, banking agency review, and Justice Department standards - and draws on learning from recent transactions in which one or more of the reviewing agencies raised concerns. It should be helpful to both antitrust lawyers and banking lawyers faced with a bank merger and to banking lawyers faced with a transaction that presents substantive competition issues.