Health Care Antitrust Practice
Crowell & Moring offers clients one of the nation's leading health care antitrust practices. Our attorneys have years of experience as well as extensive background in government health care antitrust law enforcement and in the antitrust and health law bar. Understanding the industry is essential to effective antitrust representation in the health field. Our health care antitrust team, including a former chief of the Federal Trade Commission's health care antitrust enforcement efforts, integrates exceptional antitrust capability with our longstanding national health care practice representing a broad spectrum of health care organizations.
Our antitrust practice provides practical, insightful and forceful representation in the full range of antitrust matters, including litigation, mergers and acquisitions, government investigations, transactions and counseling. Our clients include for-profit and not-for profit organizations, including health insurers, hospitals and other providers, pharmaceutical companies and medical device companies.
Our litigation practice includes defending health plans and provider-sponsored managed care organizations against provider network exclusion and boycott claims; defending against class action claims by provider groups challenging alleged discrimination in health plan contracting and payment terms; defending hospitals against conspiracy and rate setting litigation; representing health plans in suits to recover for overcharges; and defending pharmaceutical companies against monopolization, restraint of trade, and price discrimination charges.
Our integrated health care practice makes us especially effective in providing antitrust counsel to health care clients where optimal advice requires sensitivity to the complex interplay of the market and regulation in health care matters, such as structuring joint ventures among health care providers and payors, responding to inquiries or investigations by the FTC or DOJ, either of the client or of third parties, and helping clients protect themselves from the anticompetitive practices of others.
Examples of recent representations include the following:
- Guided Sierra Health Services through antitrust challenges related to its $2.6 billion sale to UnitedHealth Group, defending the deal through investigations by the Department of Justice, the Nevada Attorney General and the Nevada Division of Insurance, and obtained approval of the final consent judgment, clearing the way for the acquisition to close
- Representation of Detroit area hospital Bon Secours against charges it had conspired with other area hospitals to depress nurse wages
- Successful early termination of a Department of Justice antitrust investigation into a health plan's acquisition of a competing health insurer sponsored by a local provider organization
- Defeated plaintiff's request for a preliminary injunction and secured voluntary dismissal with prejudice of claims by a plaintiff provider network organization challenging alleged monopolization and refusal to deal by our client, a joint venture PPO sponsored by competing hospitals in Indiana
- Secured voluntary dismissal for a health insurance trade association of antitrust allegations by a putative statewide class of chiropractors that the association had conspired with HMOs to boycott chiropractors
- Defended a hospital system against charges that it had conspired to boycott the plaintiff hospital, and had attempted to monopolize the hospital market by offering variable discounts based on the number of hospitals included in a payor's PPO network and by excluding the plaintiff hospital from participation in our client's own HMO plan. We won summary judgment, which was affirmed upon appeal
- Represented DuPont Pharma (now Bristol Myers Squibb) in the Coumadin antitrust litigation and negotiated favorable settlement of a class action litigation alleging monopolization of the warfarin drug market with Coumadin
- Won a multi-million dollar award for Health Care Service Corporation after a month-long trial against Mylan Laboratories for monopolizing the markets for lorazepam and clorazepate, in the first (and so far the only) indirect purchaser/third-party payor case involving the pharmaceutical industry that was actually tried to verdict
For more information about our healthcare antitrust practice, please contact Arthur Lerner.