Federal Government Encourages Health Providers to Coordinate, Then Sues Them For Doing So
23rd August 2011
The Obama administration argued that last year’s health care overhaul was a necessary step toward restraining the growth of health spending. One of the ways it was supposed to do that was by encouraging medical providers — physicians, specialists, and hospitals — to find better ways to coordinate the delivery of health care. Highly integrated provider networks, encouraged and regulated by the federal government, would help make health care cheaper and better at the same time.
With the law’s incentives in place, some providers are indeed working on mergers intended to help coordinate care. But it turns out that in some cases, they’re running into resistance… from the federal government, in the form of Federal Trade Commission antitrust action. That’s what’s happening in Toledo, Ohio, where a hospital merger is taking heat from the FTC’s antitrust enforcers. The New York Times looks at the latest round of docs-vs.-the-FTC and reports that ongoing legal battles illustrate “the risks that arise when competing health care providers try to collaborate, as they are racing to do all over the country, in part because of incentives built into the new health law.”
Boy, don’t you just love that government-run health care?