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Full-Text Articles in Antitrust and Trade Regulation

Healthcare Mergers And Acquisitions In An Era Of Consolidation: A Review And A Call For Agency Collaboration In Antitrust Enforcement, Anna Molinari Mar 2018

Healthcare Mergers And Acquisitions In An Era Of Consolidation: A Review And A Call For Agency Collaboration In Antitrust Enforcement, Anna Molinari

Pepperdine Law Review

Healthcare companies are consolidating at an alarming rate. From hospitals, to providers’ offices, to insurance companies, there are increasingly fewer consumer choices and more monopolies, which calls for heightened antitrust enforcement. Interestingly, antitrust enforcement authority in the healthcare industry is shared between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which presides over hospital and provider mergers, and the Department of Justice (DOJ), which presides over health insurance mergers. Although the FTC has challenged many hospital and provider mergers, the DOJ has only challenged six health insurance mergers. Furthermore, last year, the DOJ ultimately approved all health insurance mergers. In 2017, in United …


Actavis And Error Costs: A Reply To Critics, Aaron S. Edlin, C. Scott Hemphill, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Carl Shapiro Oct 2017

Actavis And Error Costs: A Reply To Critics, Aaron S. Edlin, C. Scott Hemphill, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Carl Shapiro

Aaron Edlin

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, Inc. provided fundamental guidance about how courts should handle antitrust challenges to reverse payment patent settlements. In our previous article, Activating Actavis, we identified and operationalized the essential features of the Court’s analysis. Our analysis has been challenged by four economists, who argue that our approach might condemn procompetitive settlements.As we explain in this reply, such settlements are feasible, however, only under special circumstances. Moreover, even where feasible, the parties would not actually choose such a settlement in equilibrium. These considerations, and others discussed in the reply, serve to confirm …


Actavis And Error Costs: A Reply To Critics, Aaron S. Edlin, C. Scott Hemphill, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Carl Shapiro Oct 2014

Actavis And Error Costs: A Reply To Critics, Aaron S. Edlin, C. Scott Hemphill, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Carl Shapiro

All Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, Inc. provided fundamental guidance about how courts should handle antitrust challenges to reverse payment patent settlements. In our previous article, Activating Actavis, we identified and operationalized the essential features of the Court’s analysis. Our analysis has been challenged by four economists, who argue that our approach might condemn procompetitive settlements.

As we explain in this reply, such settlements are feasible, however, only under special circumstances. Moreover, even where feasible, the parties would not actually choose such a settlement in equilibrium. These considerations, and others discussed in the reply, serve to …


Non-Price Competition In “Substitute" Drugs: The Ftc's Blind Spot, Gregory Dolin Oct 2014

Non-Price Competition In “Substitute" Drugs: The Ftc's Blind Spot, Gregory Dolin

All Faculty Scholarship

As the recent case of United States v. Lundbeck illustrates, the Federal Trade Commission’s lack of knowledge in medical and pharmacological sciences affects its evaluation of transactions between medical and pharmaceutical companies that involve transfers of rights to manufacture or sell drugs, causing the agency to object to such transactions without solid basis for doing so. This article argues that in order to properly define a pharmaceutical market, one must not just consider the condition that competing drugs are meant to treat, but also take into account whether there are “off-label” drugs that are used to treat a relevant condition, …


Thirty Years Of Solicitude: Antitrust Law And Physician Cartels, Thomas L. Greaney Jan 2007

Thirty Years Of Solicitude: Antitrust Law And Physician Cartels, Thomas L. Greaney

All Faculty Scholarship

Over the last thirty years the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice have challenged dozens of physician cartels, networks, and other arrangements that they alleged constituted price fixing or other restraints of trade under the antitrust laws. In addition, the antitrust agencies have issued numerous advisory opinions, published detailed statements of enforcement policy, and made dozens of public statements on the issue of physician collaboration. The puzzle explored in this essay is why the government's deployment of unparalleled enforcement resources has not curtailed physician attempts to engage in collective bargaining and other attempts to restrain price competition. It …


Most Favored Nation Clauses, Jonathan Baker, William Kopit, Thomas Overstreet, Robert Mcnair, Jr., Steven Snow May 2003

Most Favored Nation Clauses, Jonathan Baker, William Kopit, Thomas Overstreet, Robert Mcnair, Jr., Steven Snow

Presentations

Event descriptionThe Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice will commence public hearings in Washington, D.C. on February 26, 2003 on the implications of competition law and policy for health care financing and delivery. The hearings will broadly consider the impact of competition law and policy on the cost, quality, and availability of health care, and the incentives for innovation in the field.Specific subjects to be considered include hospital mergers, the significance of non-profit status, vertical integration, quality and efficiencies, the boundaries of the state action and Noerr-Pennington doctrines, monopsony power, the adequacy of existing remedies for anticompetitive conduct, and …


Night Landings On An Aircraft Carrier: Hospital Mergers And Antitrust Law, Thomas L. Greaney Jan 1997

Night Landings On An Aircraft Carrier: Hospital Mergers And Antitrust Law, Thomas L. Greaney

All Faculty Scholarship

Abstract: Analysis of the competitive effects of hospital mergers requires antitrust tribunals to make exceedingly fine-tuned appraisals of complex economic relationships. The law requires fact finding in a number of complex areas, e.g., defining product and geographic markets, predicting the possibility of that firms will engage in coordinated behavior; and assessing efficiencies flowing from the merger. Further complicating the process is the fact that these decisions require judgments regarding what the future may hold in an industry undergoing revolutionary change. Like pilots landing at night aboard an aircraft carrier, courts are aiming for a target that is small, shifting and …


Managed Competition, Integrated Delivery Systems And Antitrust, Thomas L. Greaney Jan 1994

Managed Competition, Integrated Delivery Systems And Antitrust, Thomas L. Greaney

All Faculty Scholarship

A central question confronting proponents of managed competition during the health reform debate in 1994 was whether competitive networks or integrated delivery systems would emerge. Under reformers’ vision, controlling costs depended on the emergence of a sufficient number of efficient and viable integrated delivery systems. Conversely, if one or a few integrated networks dominate the market for physician or hospital services, rivalry on the main issues of health care cost control would likely dissipate. This article argues that vigilant and sensible antitrust enforcement was also a prerequisite for the success of the managed competition model. Despite the considerable emphasis on …


Competitive Reform In Health Care: The Vulnerable Revolution, Thomas L. Greaney Jan 1987

Competitive Reform In Health Care: The Vulnerable Revolution, Thomas L. Greaney

All Faculty Scholarship

This article, written at the dawn of the era of "competitive reform" in health care examines the case and prospects for the introduction of competition in health care delivery and financing. It observes the failures of the ancienne regime of fee for service payment and professional sovereignty and discusses the benefits of market-oriented policy. Its contribution, still salient today, is the lesson that competition cannot succeed without regulation. It identifies legislative, professional, and cultural hurdles to effective implementation of competitive norms and policies that have impeded the success of competition policy in health care.