Simonsen Sussman LLP and Blood Cancer United Release Report on Legal Remedies to Healthcare Consolidation

June 2026 — Washington, DC — Simonsen Sussman LLP and Blood Cancer United have released a new report, "An Analysis of Effective Legal Remedies to Protect Patients from Harmful Healthcare Consolidation," examining the growing wave of hospital mergers and private equity acquisitions sweeping the U.S. healthcare industry and the legal tools available to protect patients from the resulting harms.

The report explains that healthcare consolidation, particularly horizontal hospital mergers and private equity acquisitions, have been linked to higher prices, reduced quality of care, lower wages for healthcare workers, and an increased risk of catastrophic hospital closures.

As the report explains, injunctions blocking anticompetitive mergers under Section 7 of the Clayton Act remain the most effective remedy, but courts are sometimes reluctant to block deals involving financially distressed hospitals. Further, the report finds that settlements and consent decrees are a distant second-best option to a full-fledged injunction against the merger. If these settlements and consent decrees have any chance of effectiveness, they must be paired with structural divestitures with clearly enforceable conduct remedies, rather than complex, hard-to-monitor commitments that merging parties may circumvent.

The report draws on recent case studies, including the UnitedHealth-Amedisys merger and the Steward Health Care bankruptcy, to illustrate the promise and drawbacks of current antitrust enforcement tools as applied to the healthcare sector.

See the full report here.