Georgia State University College of Law Reading Room Faculty Publications By Year Faculty Publications 12-2015 Resurrecting Health Care Rate Regulation Erin C. Fuse Brown Georgia State University College of Law,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/faculty_pub Part of the Administrative Law Commons, Health Law and Policy Commons, and the Medicine and Health Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Erin C. Fuse Brown, Resurrecting Health Care Rate Regulation, 67 Hastings L.J. 85 (2015). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Reading Room. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications By Year by an authorized administrator of Reading Room. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. H - Fuse Brown_26 (Hamilton12.7) (Do Not Delete) 12/15/2015 6:00 PM Resurrecting Health Care Rate Regulation Erin C. Fuse Brown* Our excess health care spending in the United States is driven largely by our high health care prices. Our prices are so high because they are undisciplined by market forces, in a health care system rife with market failures, which include information asymmetries, noncompetitive levels of provider market concentration, moral hazard created by health insurance, multiple principal-agent relationships with misaligned incentives, and externalities from unwarranted price variation and discrimination. These health care market failures invite a regulatory solution. An array of legal and policy solutions are typically advanced to control our health care prices and spending, including: (1) market solutions that focus on transparency and consumerism to discipline health care prices; (2) antitrust enforcement to promote competition in the provider market; (3) consumer protections that protect individual uninsured or underinsured patients from unfair prices; (4) health care payment and delivery reforms that alter financial incentives of health care providers to reduce overutilization and improve efficiency; and (5) regulation of provider payment rates.