Less than a month ago, National Nurses United submitted a letter to the Federal Trade Commission expressing concern over not-for-profit Piedmont Healthcare’s potential to become a health care monopoly in the Atlanta area. The system currently owns 11 hospitals, five urgent care centers, 25 retail pharmacy care locations and 555 physician practice locations. The health system recently closed a $950 million deal to acquire four HCA Healthcare hospitals in Atlanta and has signed a letter of intent to purchase University Health Care System, which has three hospital campuses in the market.
Piedmont Healthcare isn’t the only strategic buyer under fire. Most notably and recently, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has been called to halt the acquisition of Change Healthcare by Optum, a member of UnitedHealth Group (UHG). The deal was announced back in January valued at $13 billion. The American Hospital Association (AHA) filed a complaint with the DOJ approximately two weeks after the acquisition was announced, along with several other antitrust groups.
AHA wrote a second letter last week, urging the Acting Assistant Attorney General to reinvestigate this proposed merger. The letter from AHA even noted that UHG and Change Healthcare expected antitrust issues to come up in response to their merger, creating a plan to divest assets on an as-needed basis. “We respectively maintain that the massive divestiture provision to which the parties have agreed does not provide the pathway needed to remedy the transaction’s likely substantial illegalities; rather, it strongly indicates that the deal cannot be “fixed,” the letter stated.
We even wrote back in our February newsletter that the deal would give Optum and UHG the ability to create an end-to-end health network, so it’s easy to recognize what the AHA have concerns over. It will be interesting to see how the DOJ reacts to these claims, especially after several months of no resolution following the initial complaint.
