Taking Quality of Healthcare Seriously in Provider Merger Analysis

Traditionally, antitrust has not had a way to quantify the benefits of better healthcare outcomes from a potential merger, to balance them against the potential for increased costs. However, a branch of health care economics lets us make that calculation. It has not been used in antitrust analysis to date, but U.S. law is flexible enough to allow such an approach and the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines contemplate it in Section 5. It enables us to use established procedures to put the quality of care into healthcare merger analysis