Anti Trust in Health Organizations Assignment Essay
Anti Trust in Health Organizations Assignment Essay
Anti Trust in Health Organizations Assignment Essay
You are a manager with 5 years of experience and need to write a report for senior management on how your firm can avoid the threat of a Federal Trade Commission investigation if you were to merge with other health care organizations. Research on your own to select a health care organization in the United States that has been charged with an antitrust action within the last five years and use this information as the basis for your paper. In your report
· Summarize the charges and rebuttal or mitigation of charges used by the health care organization you researched.
· Discuss lessons learned and propose actions that can be taken by your management to avoid similar anti- trust actions in your proposed merger.
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Your paper must include an introduction, thesis, and conclusion. Your paper must be four to five double-spaced pages in length (excluding title and reference pages) and formatted according to APA style as outlined. Utilize three scholarly and/or peer-reviewed sources (excluding the course text) that were published within the last five years. Cite your sources within the text of your paper and provide complete references for each source used on the reference page.
Text book: Cleverley, W. O., Song, P. H., & Cleverley, J. O. (2011). Essentials of health care finance (7th ed). Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
The effort to enforce antitrust principles in health care began in earnest only after the Supreme Court decided in 1975, in the Goldfarb case,1 that the “learned professions” enjoy no antitrust exemption. That decision, together with the prevalent concern about inflation in general and about health care costs in particular, led the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to announce a commitment of resources to the industry. This commitment has now been reinforced by three successive chairmen, and seems permanent. The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, though involved less as the result of a conscious policy choice, has nevertheless been an important factor on some issues. Several state attorneys general have also begun significant antitrust activity in the health care field.2
The pre-Goldfarb neglect of the health sector by federal antitrust authorities resulted not only from recognition of a possible implied exemption for the medical profession, but also from doubts concerning their jurisdiction,3 a significant judicial setback in the
Supreme Court in 1952,4 and a lack of expertise about the industry and its competitive shortcomings. The resulting failure to enforce the basic rules of competitive conduct allowed the entrenchment of many anticompetitive practices and institutions, which seemed, without close antitrust scrutiny, to be not only natural but also beneficial because consistently justified in terms of quality assurance, professionalism, and traditional doctor-patient relations. These established practices and institutions are now suddenly threatened by antitrust lawyers who are skeptical of the conventional explanations and justifications offered for the absence of competition in health services.
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The new antitrust effort has been met by the medical profession with the kind of displeasure usually reserved for federal regulators (and malpractice lawyers). The profession has not yet seen fit to acknowledge any distinction between antitrust enforcement and government regulation of the direct command-and-control variety, even though the former is based on a preference for free competition over government as a social control mechanism. Thus, although antitrust enforcers, as supporters of free enterprise, would seem to share doctors’ preference for viewing medical care as an essentially private business, a considerable gap in understanding has yet to be bridged. It remains to be seen whether physicians will in time come to view antitrust enforcers, if not as allies in the war against regulation, then at least as the lesser of two evils—like the enemy in a two-front war to whom one would prefer to surrender because of the nature of the regime one could expect to live under in the future (Havighurst, 1979; Havighurst and Hackbarth, 1979).
A major reason given by professionals and some others for their concern about the antitrust enforcement effort in this industry is the fear that antitrust doctrine and enforcement, being geared to commerce in ordinary goods and services, will prove insensitive to the special features of the medical care enterprise, particularly the quality-of-care problem and the medical profession’s self-regulatory responsibilities. Although the Supreme Court has periodically held out the possibility that professional services would be treated differently from other industries, each successive statement of this possibility has been framed more narrowly than the preceding one.5 Moreover, the Court has yet to decide a case limiting the reach of antitrust principles into a profession’s self-regulatory domain. It remains to be seen, therefore, precisely where substantive law will finally place the professions and whether medical care will be found to be entitled in any way to special treatment.
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