We recently wrote about the FTC filing a complaint, In re Cabell Huntington Hospital (FTC Docket No. 9366), objecting to the merger of two West Virginia hospitals. The FTC filed its complaint against the wishes of West Virginia’s antitrust enforcer, Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who approved the merger. In addition to challenging the merger, the FTC’s complaint portrays West Virginia’s regulation of healthcare facilities as inherently anticompetitive.

The West Virginia legislature has now entered the controversy. Both houses passed legislation that would foster “cooperative agreements” among healthcare providers, as long as one of the providers is “a teaching hospital which is a member of an academic medical center.”[1] The cooperative agreements include “the sharing, allocation, consolidation by merger or other combination of assets, or referral of patients, personnel, instructional programs, support services, and facilities or medical, diagnostic, or laboratory facilities or procedures or other services traditionally offered by hospitals or other health care providers.”[2]