Update: Rate Calculator Added to Bristol County Lawyers’ Website
The CPCS hourly rate calculator is based on the assumption that a bar advocate, working both for indigent clients at a government rate and for private clients at a market rate, should be able to enjoy a lifestyle that is on parity with a prosecutor or an assistant attorney general. Wages for prosecutors and AGs are lower than other attorneys who work for the Commonwealth — this is not addressed by the calculator.
The CPCS hourly rate calculator can compute the hourly rate needed to provide parity with the starting salary of a beginning assistant district attorney, in take home pay. The calculator asks for the starting salary of an assistant District Attorney, and the uplift to cover benefits (social security contribution, medical benefits, etc.). (emphasis in original)
“The Commission evaluates competitor exchanges of price and other competitively sensitive information to determine whether they have, or are likely to have, an anticompetitive effect that outweighs any procompetitive justification. In the context of this advisory opinion, the fundamental question is whether the information exchange is intended or likely to result in physicians concertedly or interdependently modifying their pricing or contracting behavior relative to health plans.
“Injury to competition and consumers would result if the proposed exchange of information facilitated an agreement among Dayton area physicians on prices to demand of health plans or an agreement to refuse to deal with health plans except on agreed terms. Comparison of payments in Dayton to insurer payments to physicians in other cities, moreover, could facilitate an agreement among Dayton physicians to use those payment levels as a starting point for negotiations with health plans for higher compensation, and to refuse to deal with plans that offer payment terms below those yardsticks. Publication of data indicating how many or what percentage of physicians receive different, specified prices for particular services, or publication of data showing how prices paid by identified payers differ, could facilitate coordinated efforts to reduce or eliminate price differences as a way of increasing average price levels.
“Because your group’s major premise is that insurer payments to Dayton physicians are unreasonably low, there is ground for concern that Dayton physicians might interpret the group’s actions as a call for collective action of this sort. Such agreements would not have to be express to violate the antitrust laws. Further, they would be unlawful per se, absent efficiency-enhancing integration among the physicians that is sufficient to justify their joint pricing or contracting with health plans. Because the proposed conduct does not involve integration, any agreement of this type would be legally unjustified.”