The Source team, in conjunction with The Petris Center and Catalyst for Payment Reform, has had new research published on hospital consolidation across geographic markets.  Consolidation among health systems has resulted in increased prices and caused the cost of employer-sponsored health benefits to increase much faster than inflation over the past few decades. Prior quantitative research demonstrates small, but significant price increases resulting from transactions that expand the geographic footprint of health systems, but the mechanisms by which these cross-market acquisitions raise prices is not completely resolved.  The methodology of this […]

The long-standing saga of Sidibe v. Sutter may finally be over.  The case, initially filed in federal district court for the Northern District of California in September 2012, has a long and convoluted history of complaints, amended complaints, a district court dismissal, an appeals court reversal, a summary judgment of some causes of action, a jury trial, and an appeal, among other steps. On March 2, 2025, the parties filed a notice in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California stating that an agreement in principle to […]

On November 7, California Governor Gavin Newsom called for a special session of the California Legislature to take steps to protect California from anticipated changes driven by the new Trump administration.  While many of the Governor’s areas of concern are not directly related to healthcare (including protecting civil rights, climate action, and immigrant families), there is a focus on reproductive rights, women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights. The special session convened on December 2.  The primary goal of the session is to provide additional resources to the state Department of Justice […]

On Saturday, Sept 18, 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed California AB 3129, legislation that would have created a requirement for the Attorney General to review and give approval before private equity groups could buy into certain health care facilities and providers (previously reported on by The Source). In his veto message, the Governor stated that the Office of Health Care Affordability (OHCA), established in 2022, “was created as the responsible state entity to review proposed health care transactions, and it would be more appropriate for the OHCA to oversee these consolidation issues as […]

The convoluted journey of the FTC’s attempt to ban noncompete agreements has taken another turn.  On July 23, a Federal District Court Judge reversed a ruling from a lower Federal Court in Texas that had temporarily blocked the FTC from enforcing the rule, pending ongoing litigation.  The most recent ruling states that the FTC has the power to ban anticompetitive practices, including noncompete agreements.  The ruling also states that the plaintiff had not shown that it would suffer irreparable harm from the rule if it were allowed to go into […]

On Wednesday, July 3, 2024, a Texas Federal Court issued a preliminary injunction against the FTC’s noncompete ban in the case brought by Ryan LLC and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, preventing the rule from taking effect on September 4.  The decision, made by U.S. District Judge Ada Brown, stated that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits that the FTC lacks authority to promulgate the rule, which the Judge called “arbitrary and capricious”, and that that blocking the rule temporarily is in the public interest.  Although the […]

On a 6-3 decision following party lines, the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a long-standing legal precedent that required courts to generally defer to regulations issued by Federal agencies that interpret and enact Congressional statutes, commonly referred to as Chevron deference.  Chevron deference required courts to defer to an agency’s “reasonable interpretations” of ambiguous statutes passed by Congress. The end of the precedent opens the doors to legal challenges of existing Federal administrative law, and will likely weaken the ability of Federal agencies to issue administrative regulations […]

On Tuesday, June 4, 2024, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Sutter Health’s win in a $411 million antitrust suit, saying that the jury that found in favor of Sutter in 2022 was given improper jury instructions, and that the plaintiffs were improperly prevented from presenting relevant evidence. In September 2012, a class of individuals and employers who purchased fully insured plans from the five largest commercial health insurance companies in California filed this lawsuit alleging that Sutter Health restricted competition in the healthcare market using anticompetitive tactics. A similar lawsuit, […]

A new research article examining the impact of “cross-market” hospital mergers on prices and quality published in Health Services Research has been co-authored by The Source’s own Jaime King, Katherine Gudiksen, Alexandra Montague, and Thomas Greaney, along with our long-time collaborators, Daniel Arnold, Brent Fulton, and Richard Scheffler, from The Petris Center at UC Berkeley. The study is the first to measure the impact of cross-market hospital acquisitions on quality and the first to identify price effects from multiple cross-market acquisitions (i.e. serial acquisitions).  The study used commercial claims data […]

For Health Affairs Forefront, the Source’s Katherine Gudiksen and Jaime King have analyzed changes from the draft version to the final 2023 Merger Guidelines released by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ). In a previous Health Affairs Forefront piece, Source staff examined the draft guidelines.  This new post examines key elements of the new guidelines, concluding that while the final version better aligns the Guidelines with the underlying antitrust laws and caselaw, the Guidelines create more grey area for companies to demonstrate that mergers do not […]