AHA Urges FTC to Examine Anticompetitive Behavior by Nurse-Staffing Agencies and Commercial Insurers

The AHA requests that the Federal Trade Commission use its resources to tackle several issues that are adversely impacting hospitals as well as reconsider its recently announced retrospective study of mergers between physician groups and health care facilities.

The new administration has made it abundantly clear that the nation’s top priority is combating COVID-19. While the FTC is technically an independent agency, there is great deal of useful work it could do to add its resources and expertise to combat the effects of the pandemic, such as:

• Investigate reports of anticompetitive pricing by nurse-staffing agencies, and
• Investigate conduct by several major commercial health insurance companies that is adversely affecting patients and the hospitals that care for them.

Efforts such as these would seem to be a better use of the FTC’s resources than yet another retrospective involving the hospital field undertaken in the midst of national public health emergency of historic proportions that has placed unprecedented stress on the nation’s hospitals for more than a year.

Read the full letter to the FTC under Key Resources.