Anticompetitive contracting practices have been under antitrust enforcement scrutiny from both state regulators and private parties in recent years. In California, hospital giant Sutter Health faced several high-profile lawsuits for its alleged anticompetitive contracts. While the state case led by the California attorney general settled earlier this year, the federal class action is on its way to the 9th Circuit appeal. HCA Healthcare, a large health system in North Carolina, appear to be the next health system under litigation fire for similar practices. Three separate actions have been filed by …

As federal agencies including the FTC and DOJ step up antitrust enforcement efforts in response to Biden’s executive order to revamp competition in the healthcare market, more and more healthcare entities are turning to less traditional consolidation that did not previously trigger antitrust scrutiny, such as “cross-market” mergers, which involve providers that do not directly compete in the same geographic market.[1] This month in Litigation and Enforcement Highlights, we take a look at the latest merger review and conditional approval of a proposed cross-market transaction in California, the third of …

It’s been a busy month in healthcare antitrust land, both for federal regulators and private plaintiffs, as we saw an explosion of enforcement actions challenging both proposed mergers and anticompetitive conduct that stemmed from previous mergers. From New Jersey to Utah, large health systems such as HCA are being increasingly scrutinized and coming under fire for garnering and using their market power in anticompetitive ways.   Merger Challenges Fresh from its appeals court win in the Hackensack Meridian and Englewood merger challenge, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is continuing its …

California is one of the leading states in healthcare antitrust enforcement. Following the footsteps of former California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who led the antitrust lawsuit against northern California hospital giant Sutter Health, the new attorney general Rob Bonta continues to exercise the AG’s expansive authority with aggressive enforcement actions in the California provider market. Earlier in the summer, the AG’s office settled a lawsuit filed by Cedars-Sinai Health System and Huntington Memorial Hospital, with revised competitive impact conditions on the cross-market affiliation in Southern California to address potential harms …

Healthcare entities have continued to actively pursue proposed mergers and affiliations during —and in part driven by— the coronavirus pandemic. Since the settlement of the Sutter Health antitrust lawsuit, the proposed affiliation of Cedars-Sinai Health System and Huntington Memorial Hospital in California has emerged as the leading case that has captured the attention of health policy experts as to its antitrust implications. The Source also weighed in on the case with an amicus brief filed with the Los Angeles County Superior Court. In this post, we further detail the background …

In this mid-year issue of Litigation and Enforcement Highlights, we provide updates on  several pending healthcare transactions. As much of the country recovers from COVID-19, healthcare entities continue to actively pursue proposed mergers and affiliations that could further change the landscape of the healthcare market. In the last update, federal enforcement agencies saw a mixed bag of results to their enforcement efforts, with an FTC loss against Jefferson-Albert Einstein, a DOJ settlement with Geisinger-Evangelical, and several proposed mergers that buckled under antitrust scrutiny (see case reference table below). Since then, …