Government Agencies to Share Data to Understand Corporate Power’s Effect on Healthcare

The Biden Administration wants to investigate how private equity and other corporations’ increasing power and control of the healthcare system is affecting Americans.

The administration announced that the Department of Justice (DOJ), the FTC and HHS will issue a joint request for information to seek input about how corporate forces are affecting the delivery of medicine in the U.S. As part of this effort, HHS will appoint a chief competition officer and DOJ’s Antitrust Division and FTC will name counsels for healthcare to lead these efforts.

The White House also said it will work to identify anticompetitive “roll ups” that currently evade antitrust review. Roll ups result when a larger corporate entity acquires several small companies and places them under a larger corporate umbrella. This may violate antitrust laws, said the administration, as roll ups can lead to the consolidation of a market and contribute to worse patient outcomes while increasing taxpayer costs.

Read the White House statement here.

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