Antitrust Chronicle® – Healthcare

Dear Readers,

Of all areas of public policy, few raise passions as intensely as healthcare. After all, healthcare touches the entire human experience, in the famous words of Churchill, “from the Cradle to the Grave.” Indeed, regulating healthcare involves making decisions that affect birth, death, disease suffering, and, from an antitrust perspective, the economic welfare of individuals and the State.

The provision of healthcare services varies widely across jurisdictions, perhaps best exemplified by the contrasting approaches in the U.S., where reliance on private healthcare providers and insurers are the norm, and the approaches in European jurisdictions, where the State plays a more prominent role, though private healthcare markets exist in parallel. On both sides of the Atlantic, changes are afoot, as discussed in the timely contributions to this edition of the Chronicle.

Starting with the U.S., Holden Brooks examines how major changes are underway with respect to how healthcare deals get done in the U.S., with new merger guidelines and HSR reporting requirements waiting in the wings, new analytical frameworks being explored, and new pre-close notice and clearance laws proliferating at a rapid pace at the state level. More small-scale healthcare deals will be subject to some type of antitrust scrutiny than ever before, with many clients confronting antitrust principles and processes for the first time. As a result, for practitioners, providing effective advi