While regulators are expected to clamp down on hospital-led acquisitions of physician practices, the Federal Trade Commission’s reworking of the vertical merger guidelines isn’t expected to thwart proposed transactions, Modern Healthcare reports, citing antitrust experts.
Whether or not the FTC enforces stricter guidelines, they aren’t the law, said Katherine Funk, an antitrust attorney at Baker Donelson. “If you are making a vertical merger case in court, you don’t have the bright-line rules like you do in horizontal mergers—it’s much more nuanced and reliant on economic evidence,” she said. “I think the agency is going to have the same problem it has had in respect to past vertical transactions.” Read more.
