A question of community: at not-for-profit hospitals health is a local affair

For-profit hospitals' entrepreneurial status, big business climate, and adherence to market discipline mandate that their services be considered akin to any other market commodity, to be bought and sold at the highest margin to the largest audience. Investor owned healthcare's primary allegiance must be a reasonable return to its stockholders and as a result it must avoid unprofitable services and unprofitable patients, by displacing their costly burdens onto the rest of the healthcare system.     

Collectively bargained public health benefit plans

The marketplace for health benefits for public sector employees is large and complex with a great variety of approaches for providing care and a difficult patchwork of regulatory and collective bargaining regulation to deal with in designing a plan. Public sector workers' plans are subject to an additional constraint provided by the political nature of the process. The products sold to public sector plans are not regulated as ERISA plans, given the exclusion of government plans and the differential regulation of collectively bargained plans under the HMO act. This article attempts to guide the reader through some of the difficulties of this marketplace, pointing out pitfalls and opportunities where they appear.     

The “Iron Law of Paternalism” in Employee Grievances and Arbitration? A Comparison of Disciplinary and Nondisciplinary Cases

In the criminology literature, the iron law of paternalism suggests that women receive less serious sanctions in the judicial system. This examination of three years of grievance outcomes (n= 1216) and arbitration outcomes (n= 1146) tests this iron law in the context of organizational disciplinary and dispute resolutions. These data, across several levels of outcomes (win, lose, compromise), controlling for the severity of grievances (disciplinary/nondisciplinary) and arbitrations (termination/nontermination) provide no support for the paternalistic thesis. Moreover, we find no support for the paternalistic thesis with regard to either the incidence or length of suspensions as a function of gender.     

Institutional Evolution through Purposeful Selection: The Constitutional Economics of John R. Commons

The paper relates John. R. Commons view on the roleof human design in institutional evolution to the views thathave been advanced on this matter by F. A. Hayek, in German ordo-liberalism,and in constitutional political economy. It is argued that Commonsconcept of purposeful selection points in the direction ofa theoretical perspective that consistently integrates the notionsof institutional evolution and constitutional design.