U.S. Government Forms Task Force Targeting Healthcare Monopolies, Collusion

The U.S. Justice Department is forming a task force to protect the public against unfair competition and potential crimes within the healthcare market. 

The agency’s Antitrust Division has created the Task Force on Health Care Monopolies and Collusion (HCMC), which aims to guide the division’s enforcement strategy and policy approach in healthcare by facilitating policy advocacy, investigations and, where warranted, civil and criminal enforcement in healthcare markets.
 
“Every year, Americans spend trillions of dollars on healthcare, money that is increasingly being gobbled up by a small number of payers, providers and dominant intermediaries that have consolidated their way to power in communities across the country,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney General Jonathan Kanter of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. “Led by Katrina Rouse, the task force will identify and root out monopolies and collusive practices that increase costs, decrease quality and create single points of failure in the health care industry.”
 
The HCMC will consider widespread competition concerns shared by patients, healthcare professionals, businesses and entrepreneurs, including issues regarding payer-provider consolidation, serial acquisitions, labor and quality of care, medical billing, healthcare IT services, access to and misuse of healthcare data, and more. The HCMC will bring together civil and criminal prosecutors, economists, healthcare industry experts, technologists, data scientists, investigators and policy advisors from across the division’s Civil, Criminal, Litigation and Policy Programs, and the Expert Analysis Group, to identify and address pressing antitrust problems in healthcare markets.
 
The HCMC will be directed by Katrina Rouse, a long-serving antitrust prosecutor who joined the Antitrust Division in 2011. She previously served as chief of the division’s Defense, Industrials and Aerospace Section, assistant chief of the Division’s San Francisco Office, a special assistant U.S. Attorney and a trial attorney in the division’s Healthcare and Consumer Products Section. She holds degrees from Columbia University and Stanford Law School, and clerked for federal judges on the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Rouse will serve concurrently as the division’s deputy director of Civil Enforcement and special counsel for Health Care.
 
The Antitrust Division welcomes input and information from the public, including from practitioners, patients, researchers, business owners and others who have direct insight into competition concerns in the health care industry. Members of the public can share their experiences with the Task Force on Health Care Monopolies and Collusion by visiting HealthyCompetition.gov. Where appropriate, the division will refer matters to other federal and state law enforcers.