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A new bid for antitrust relief: Congress tries again

Bipartisan legislation for physician antitrust relief is up in the U.S. House of Representatives. It has strong support from organized medicine.

Editorial. April 15, 2002.

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Doctors love it. Health plans hate it. Another essential fact about nationwide antitrust relief for physicians: Only Congress can make it happen.

Lawmakers again have their chance to act, this time with a revamped bill titled the Health Care Antitrust Improvements Act of 2002 (HR 3897), introduced by U.S. Reps. Bob Barr (R, Ga.) and John Conyers Jr. (D, Mich.). This bipartisan measure is strongly supported by the AMA and nearly three dozen medical specialty societies.

The last time such legislation was put forward, in 2000, the House approved it by a wide margin but the measure was not introduced in the Senate. This latest version is designed to respond to the Senate's reservations.

The need for such a law has been growing for some time. Both patients and independent physicians need an effective counterbalance to the proven marketplace concentration and clout of health plans. Increasingly, in this era of health plan consolidation, a single health plan will dominate a local or state market. When that happens, patients and physicians are often faced with take-it-or-leave-it edicts that can compromise patient care.

The proposed law would address the problem in several ways.

One is to require the Federal Trade Commission to apply the aptly named "rule of reason" analysis to collective negotiations by independent physicians. It means that such physician collective negotiations that actually promote competition, quality or access to health care would be acceptable. [...]