In April 2002, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the Hospital Merger Retrospective Project to study consummated hospital mergers. This project was precipitated by a long string of unsuccessful hospital merger challenges by the FTC, the US Department of Justice, and the state of...

Retrospective analyses of hospital mergers may be uniquely valuable because they speak directly to two important issues - the methods used for delineating relevant geographic markets in hospital merger analysis, and the implications of not-for-profit status on post-merger hospital pricing - that...