The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust division has announced the creation of a task force that will focus on health-care monopolies and collusion (HCMC).
In a May 9 news announcement, the DOC said the HCMC “will guide the division’s enforcement strategy and policy approach in health care, including by facilitating policy advocacy, investigations and, where warranted, civil and criminal enforcement in health-care markets.”
“Every year, Americans spend trillions of dollars on health care, 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,” Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter of the Justice Department’s antitrust division said in the announcement. “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.”
Rouse is a veteran antitrust prosecutor who joined the antitrust division in 2011. She will concurrently serve as the division’s deputy director of civil enforcement and special counsel for health care.
The DOJ announcement said the new task force “will consider widespread competition concerns shared by patients, health-care professionals, businesses and entrepreneurs, including issues regarding payer-provider consolidation, serial acquisitions, labor and quality of care, medical billing, health-care IT services, access to misuse of health-care data and more.”
The task force will be composed of civil and criminal prosecutors, economists, health-care industry experts, technologists, data scientists, investigators, and policy advisors “to identify and address pressing antitrust problems in health-care markets,” the DOJ said.
