Courts reviewing proposed mergers of nonprofit hospitals have been abandoning the bedrock principles of antitrust law, failing to pay heed to the most elemental hallmarks of socially beneficial competition - maximizing allocative efficiency and total surplus. This article suggests that courts' inability to recognize antitrust concerns in these cases reflects a failure to understand the structural details of the American health care market. After reviewing recent cases in which courts have denied challenges to proposed mergers between nonprofit hospitals, it documents how courts have engaged in a faulty analysis that ultimately protect nonprofit hospitals from the rigors of standard antitrust scrutiny. It then identifies the bedrock principles of antitrust law - preventing supracompetitive prices, optimizing output, and maximizing allocative efficiency - that have been absent from, if not violated by, the rulings in these merger cases.

Antitrust laws touch upon a wide range of conduct and business relationships in the delivery of health care services, and the issues that should be of concern to health care organizations are described. Health Care Antitrust provides practical overviews of the principal legal issues relating to health care antitrust, as well as a general understanding of antitrust analysis as applied to contractual relationships and business strategies that present antitrust risks in a managed care environment.

A comprehensive analysis of merger outcomes based on all empirical studies, with an assessment of the effectiveness of antitrust policy toward mergers. In recent decades, antitrust investigations and cases targeting mergers—including those involving Google, Ticketmaster, and much of the domestic airline industry—have reshaped industries and changed business practices profoundly. And yet there has been a relative dearth of detailed evaluations of the effects of mergers and the effectiveness of merger policy. In this book, John Kwoka, a noted authority on industrial organization, examines all reliable empirical studies of the effect of specific mergers and develops entirely new information about the policies and remedies of antitrust agencies regarding these mergers. Combined with data on outcomes, this policy information enables analysis of, and creates new insights into, mergers, merger policies, and the effectiveness of remedies in preventing anticompetitive outcomes. After an overview of mergers, merger policy, and a common approach to merger analysis, Kwoka offers a detailed analysis of the studied mergers, relevant policies, and chosen remedies. Kwoka finds, first and foremost, that most of the studied mergers resulted in competitive harm, usually in the form of higher product prices but also with respect to various non-price outcomes. Other important findings include the fact that joint ventures and code sharing arrangements do not result in such harm and that policies intended to remedy mergers—especially conduct remedies—are not generally effective in restraining price increases. The book's uniquely comprehensive analysis advances our understanding of merger decisions and policies, suggests policy improvements for competition agencies and remedies, and points the way to future research.