Health Care

“The Way Insurance Companies Have Rigged Our Health Care System, They’re Probably Going to Emerge as Financial Winners from This”

Author and former health insurance executive Wendell Potter explains to ProMarket why the employer-based health care system in the US is “collapsing” and why health...

The Amazon of Health Care: How CVS Is Evolving From a Drug Store Chain into a Tech Platform

CVS is built on a dominant chain of drug stores, but it is now trying to turn itself into a "uniquely powerful platform" for...

The Rise of the Opioids: How Purdue Invented New Markets for OxyContin

Purdue's strategy was to market its opioids directly to patients via brochures, videos, advertisements, and the internet. It also provided information to doctors and...

Hospital Mergers: The Forgotten Problem of American Health Care

In the US, there are more than 100 hospital mergers every year. This increasing concentration does not lead to the promised savings, nor to...

Study: Medicaid Expansion in Michigan Led to Less Financial Distress

A new study finds that obtaining health insurance coverage leads to lower unpaid debt, fewer bankruptcies, fewer evictions, fewer late payments, and higher credit...

The Secret Driver of US Health Care Costs: Politicians Wanting to Get Reelected

A pioneering new study provides a first-of-its-kind look into the outsized effect that lobbying and political maneuverings have on health care spending. Americans spend significantly more...

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A World With Far Fewer Mergers

Brooke Fox and Walter Frick analyze research and ideas presented at the Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference that question the value of mergers.

The Banking Risks of Central Bank Digital Currencies

The implementation of central bank digital currencies as the primary medium of exchange would exacerbate the flaws of our current fiat system which encourage banks to overextend credit and create liabilities that they cannot redeem. This will worsen the already recurring cycles of financial crises, writes Vibhu Vikramaditya.

The Whig History of the Merger Guidelines

A pervasive "Whig" view of United States antitrust history among scholars and practitioners celebrates the Merger Guidelines' implementation of increasingly sophisticated economic methods since their...

Algorithmic Collusion in the Housing Market

While the development of artificial intelligence has led to efficient business strategies, such as dynamic pricing, this new technology is vulnerable to collusion and consumer harm when companies share the same software through a central platform. Gabriele Bortolotti highlights the importance of antitrust enforcement in this domain for the second article in our series, using as a case study the RealPage class action lawsuit in the Seattle housing market.

The Future Markets Model Explains Meta/Within: A Reply to Herb Hovenkamp

In response to both Herb Hovenkamp’s February 27 article in ProMarket and, perhaps more importantly, also to Hovenkamp’s highly regarded treatise, Lawrence B. Landman, first, shows that the Future Markets Model explains the court’s decision in Meta/Within. Since Meta was not even trying to make a future product, the court correctly found that Meta would not enter the Future Market. Second, the Future Markets Model is the analytical tool which Hovenkamp says the enforcers lack when they try to protect competition to innovate.

The Chicago Boys and the Chilean Neoliberal Project

In a new book, The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism, Sebastian Edwards details the history of neoliberalism in Chile over the past seventy years. The Chicago Boys—a group of Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago through the U.S. State Department’s “Chile Project”—played a central role in neoliberalism’s ascent during General Augusto Pinochet’s rule. What follows is an excerpt from the book on University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman’s 1975 visit to Chile to meet with Pinochet and business leaders.

Creating a Modern Antitrust Welfare Standard that Integrates Post-Chicago and Neo-Brandeisian Goals

Darren Bush, Mark Glick, and Gabriel A. Lozada argue that the Consumer Welfare Standard  is inconsistent with modern welfare economics and that a modern approach to antitrust could integrate traditional Congressional goals as advocated by the Neo-Brandesians. Such an approach could be the basis for an alliance between the post-Chicago economists and the Neo-Brandesians.