We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
PRICE TRANSPARENCY AND INCOMPLETE CONTRACTS IN HEALTH CARE.
- Authors
Epstein, Wendy Netter
- Abstract
Market-based health reform solutions dominate the post-Affordable Care Act landscape. Under these plans, competition is supposed to bring down ballooning prices, and patients are to act more like consumers, refusing low value, medically unnecessary care. Whether one embraces these solutions, one thing is clear: they cannot work absent price transparency--which the U.S. system lacks. To the contrary, the law explicitly enforces open price term contracts between patients and providers. This Article is the first to synthesize theories of incomplete contracts from traditional law and economics and recent work in the behavioral sciences and to apply these theories to the price transparency problem. It argues that doctrine is out of step with theory, and proposes a contract law solution: an information-forcing penalty default rule. Courts should impose an undesirable default to force the parties to contract around the default. When providers fail to include a price, and it would have been reasonable to do so, courts should fill the gap with a price of SO. Rather than risk not being paid, providers will include a price in the patient contract. Legislative action has been both slow and ineffective in fixing the crucial price transparency problem. At no other time in recent memory has the importance of contract theory been put into such sharp relief and, remarkably, in an area of law that is at the very core of the emerging political economy.
- Subjects
UNITED States; INCOMPLETE contracts; PRICE regulation; MEDICAL care costs; HEALTH care reform; OPEN price system; PHYSICIAN-patient relations -- Law &; legislation; PATIENT Protection &; Affordable Care Act; COURTS; TWENTY-first century; MEDICAL care laws
- Publication
Emory Law Journal, 2017, Vol 67, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
0094-4076
- Publication type
Article