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LPE Originals

What Stands in the Way of Abundance in Healthcare?

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Recent public initiatives to manufacture insulin highlight both the promise and pitfalls of the new politics of “abundance.” Although states are capable of producing high-quality, affordable medicines, these efforts inevitably face resistance from powerful private interests. Without recognizing this as a central obstacle and building the political will to overcome it, plans to expand public production, in healthcare or elsewhere, are unlikely to succeed.
LPE Originals

The Same Script: Value-Based Payment, Managed Care, and Neoliberalism

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Though heralded as a policy innovation, value-based payment has not succeeded in lowering costs and has instead fueled corporate consolidation, as many physicians are ill-equipped to assume the financial risk that the payment model requires. Embodying the core tenets of neoliberalism, VBP is ultimately a failure of policymakers to equitably and efficiently administer a public health care program.
LPE Originals

A Dialysis Duopoly: How Public Funding Entrenched Private Power

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For the half-million people in the U.S. with kidney failure, survival rests in the hands of two powerful corporations — DaVita and Fresenius — that control over 70% of the outpatient dialysis market. But the history of dialysis isn’t a simple narrative of corporate consolidation; it’s a case study of how public funding can entrench private power in health care.
LPE Originals

State Efforts to Rein in Corporate Medicine

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Private equity firms are acquiring dominant shares of physician practices, creating conflicts between shareholder value and physicians’ professional and ethical duties. While longstanding state laws that prohibit lay ownership of medical practices have been under-enforced and evaded, recent litigation and legislative proposals suggest they could be revitalized to address today’s forms of corporatization.
LPE Originals

Consolidating Care: A Symposium on Medicine and Market Power

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From the dialysis market to the pharmaceutical industry, health care is seeing growing consolidation and corporatization. Over the next month, this symposium will explore the financialization of various health care industries and begin to sketch the contours of a progressive pushback—how law, policy, and regulatory action can help erect guardrails to protect us from both illness and insolvency.