Article Case Analysis

The article I have chosen relates to critical issues in Hospital Antitrust law and how common this issue is within the health care setting. While many people are unaware of the litigation involving hospitals and staff, what goes on behind closed doors can often become a more public issue. Issues can relate to the following but not limited to; hospital-hospital relations, hospital-physician relations and hospital-payer relations. According to The Hammer (2009) a key in answered question in each of these areas is how government regulation and public purchasing affect competitive markets for hospital services. The Hammer (2009)"Business transactions involving hospitals are numerous, but only a few raise antitrust concerns. Strictest scrutiny is reserved for agreements between direct competitors—what antitrust lawyers call “horizontal restraints.” Because the ability to raise price unilaterally (“market power”) is a prerequisite for most antitrust violations—price fixing being an important exception—medical antitrust law may have its sharpest bite in small and medium-size communities that can support only a handful of hospitals. A transaction involving two local freestanding hospitals may well gets more antitrust attention than the merger of two national hospital chains. Attempts to prevent hospital mergers are simultaneously the most visible and the least successful aspect of public antitrust enforcement. Justice Potter Stewart once quipped that the “sole consistency” to be found in merger cases was that “the government always wins.” In health care, the government does not always win. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) have actively prosecuted hospital mergers since the mid-1980s. In terms of cases resulting in published court opinions, hospital mergers account for nearly half of government enforcement activities in health care." This presents just one of the many issues that can become critical impairing resources from areas that