The FTCs’ Analysis Week 7 Discussion

The FTCs’ Analysis Week 7 Discussion

A physician-hospital organization (PHO) consists of 15 hospitals – with 2,247 staffed beds – and approximately 500 physicians. The PHO operates in a very large section of south Georgia, including the cities of Valdosta, Tifton, Thomasville, Moultrie, and Waycross. The PHOs’ physician members represent approximately 90 percent of all physicians practicing in the region.

The PHO served as a vehicle through which competing hospitals and physicians could bargain collectively with health plans to obtain higher fees for themselves. The owner PHOs, member hospitals, and member physicians canceled contracts with payors and informed them that the PHO would be the sole entity through which they would enter into payor contracts. To contract with the PHO, payors allegedly have had to accept the fixed physician fee schedule and fixed discount of no more than 10 percent off hospital list prices.

Explain why this arrangement would be found “per se” illegal under the FTCs’ analysis.
What kind of actions could be taken to restructure this arrangement to avoid a determination that it is per se illegal?
Discuss the alternate FTC analysis that is applied to such cases if they are suspect but not found to be per se illegal.

Limit your responses to a maximum of three pages, not including title and reference pages.
Be sure to utilize at least 3-4 scholarly references to support your discussions.
Be sure to properly cite your references within the text of your assignment and listed at the end.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.