Antitrust laws a threat to President Obama's Healthcare reform plans

[HopeOverFear]

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s campaign to cut health costs by $2 trillion over the next decade, announced with fanfare two weeks ago, may have hit another snag: the nation’s antitrust laws.

Antitrust lawyers say doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and drug makers will be running huge legal risks if they get together and agree on a strategy to hold down prices and reduce the growth of health spending.

Robert F. Leibenluft, a former official at the Federal Trade Commission, said, “Any agreement among competitors with regard to prices or price increases — even if they set a maximum — would raise legal concerns.”

Already, some leaders of the health care industry who appeared at the White House on May 11 say the president may have overstated their cost-control commitment. Three days after the gathering, hospital executives said that they had agreed to help save $2 trillion by gradually slowing the growth of health spending, but that they did not commit to cutting the growth rate by 1.5 percentage points each year for 10 years.

White House officials say even the more limited commitment is significant. Under current law, federal officials predict that health spending will grow an average of 6.2 percent a year, to $4.4 trillion in 2018.

Mr. Obama is asking the industry for detailed proposals to control costs. But so far the administration has not offered the industry any relief from antitrust laws and has, in fact, vowed to step up enforcement.

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama said consumers had suffered because of “lax enforcement” of antitrust laws in many health insurance markets.

[avaistheone1]

1. The health care industry started back peddling their cost containment

agreement with the Obama administraton days after they cut the deal.

We need to go to single-payer health insurance if we are going to keep the working and middle class above water and keep people healthy in this country.

[EFerrari]

2. So cost containment raises anti-trust concerns but not the decades

of rapine by the insurance industry? lol

[redqueen]

3. Oh all of a sudden Antitrust laws matter again?

These corporatist fucks are so transparent.

[HopeOverFear]

4. lol yep

[snowdays]

6. It is not the corportist only--as the Justice Dept and SC have said maximum

cost controls are illegal. I wonder why the WH is pushing this when the law is clear. any voluntary cost controls would be a drop in the bucket--regardless of the 'fanfare" as the article points out earlier.


..............In 1993, when President Bill Clinton made the last major effort to overhaul the health care system, the lobby for the drug industry, then known as the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, devised a voluntary cost-control plan. Under it, each drug company offered to limit the annual increase in the average price of its prescription drug products to the increase in the Consumer Price Index.

The Justice Department rejected the proposal, saying it would violate antitrust laws. In blocking the proposal, the department said the Supreme Court had made clear that agreements setting maximum prices were just as illegal as agreements that set minimum ones.

“Such maximum price-fixing agreements create the risk that the maximum prices will become minimum or uniform prices,” the department said in a business review letter signed Oct. 1, 1993, by Anne K. Bingaman, then the assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division.

In 1978, hospitals also asked the Justice Department for an assurance they would not be charged with antitrust violations when they undertook a “voluntary effort” to curb costs as an alternative to legislation proposed by President Jimmy Carter. The department would not provide such an assurance.

[DJ13]

5. Theres no way around it, just nationalize our health care system

Stop trying to keep the insurance executives wealthy, just go single payer and be done with it!

[snowdays]

7. Unfortuateley, Obama started out this reform in a weak postion and

it is going downhill fast. He and congress were not bold enough to start with.