The health care industry is left with regulatory uncertainty more than a year after the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission withdrew what they called out-of-date policy statements related to antitrust enforcement in medical markets, antitrust lawyers said Tuesday.
Policy statements, though nonbinding, “serve really as strong guidance to health care providers and their lawyers in counseling across a wide range of antitrust issues, whether it be dealing with—in the merger context—joint ventures, joint purchasing agreements, some sort of information exchange, and also the formation and operation of either clinically integrated networks or financially integrated networks,” said Michelle Mantine, an antitrust partner at Reed Smith.
