The health care industry continues to undergo unprecedented consolidation. Health
care providers and payors alike have pursued a wide variety of integrative strategies
to achieve efficiencies or other business advantages. The Health Care Mergers
and Acquisitions Handbook is designed to educate the practitioner about the
antitrust analysis of mergers and acquisitions within the health care industry.
Over the past two decades there has been an extraordinary amount of litigation
related to challenges of hospital mergers. Each chapter identifies and analyzes
important antitrust issues governing such consolidations. Accordingly, the first
several chapters are devoted to a detailed treatment of substantive issues peculiar
to such mergers:
- an introduction to hospital merger litigation, describing trends in litigation
and the way in which such mergers are analyzed
- issues unique to market definition, including product market definition
and geographic market definition
- the competitive effects of hospital mergers, assessing the evidence necessary
to establish a prima facie case in a merger challenge, and the rebuttal arguments
offered by merging parties
- a unique rebuttal argument offered by merging hospitals that is treated
separately due to its prominent role in hospital merger litigation - the role
and significance of efficiencies in determining the competitive merits of
such mergers
- the potential applicability of the state action doctrine to hospital mergers.
In addition to a substantive treatment of hospital mergers, the Handbook
also addresses
- combinations of health care management organizations (HMOs) and physician
practice groups
- the analysis used by the enforcement agencies when reviewing mergers of
HMOs
- antitrust issues posed by physician practice consolidations.
The appendix contains a chart summarizing litigated hospital mergers.
|
