Healthcare Antitrust

Overview

Competition in Transactions and Consolidation

Antitrust and competition concerns sit at the center of many of the group’s transactions. Benesch’s Healthcare team regularly serves as healthcare regulatory counsel in acquisitions, recapitalizations and joint ventures involving health systems, skilled nursing and senior living portfolios, home health and hospice platforms, dental and physician practice roll-ups, behavioral health organizations, pharmacies and health care technology companies. These deals often involve private equity sponsors, REIT and HUD financing, or complex capital stacks. In each matter, we pair regulatory due diligence with market competition analysis and strategic advice on deal structure, governance and post-closing integration.

Networks, Value-Based Care and Managed Care

The team also handles competition issues that arise outside traditional M&A. We have deep experience with value-based and risk arrangements, including accountable care organizations, clinically integrated networks, provider-sponsored health plans, Medicare Advantage structures and other shared savings and shared risk programs. Our lawyers negotiate and draft value-based contracts between payors and providers, structure co-management and quality incentive arrangements, and design bundled and capitated payment models. We counsel nephrology and other physician practices, dialysis and vascular access joint ventures, long-term and post-acute providers, and “whole person” senior care organizations on how network design, referral patterns, incentives and information-sharing align with antitrust and competition requirements.

Regulatory Approvals, Market Entry and Advocacy

Market competition also plays a role in regulatory approvals that control who can enter or grow in a given area. Our Healthcare attorneys represent hospitals, health systems, ambulatory surgery centers, behavioral health providers, dialysis and vascular access centers, cancer centers and other facilities in securing Certificates of Need, exemptions and related approvals across multiple states. These matters often involve questions of capacity, service duplication and community need, which we evaluate alongside antitrust and market dynamics. Drawing on our work with industry leaders, trade associations and professional societies, we help clients anticipate how policy shifts, reimbursement changes and enforcement trends may affect consolidation strategies and collaborative care models, and we coordinate responses when antitrust concerns overlap with investigations, audits or other regulatory actions.

Grounded in broad transactional and regulatory experience across the healthcare sector, we help clients pursue growth, integration and innovation while managing the antitrust risks that come with them.