President Donald Trump has nixed an executive order, issued by then-President Joe Biden in 2021, that increased antitrust enforcement in healthcare in an effort to promote competition in markets.
Biden’s original executive order singled out insurance industry monopolistic practices, rural hospital consolidation and thorny prescription drug market patent laws.
It also supported a government-run public health insurance option and allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices.
In a statement issued last week, Trump’s Department of Justice called the Biden administration’s approach “overly prescriptive and burdensome,” and said the current administration is promoting competition through “tailored executive orders that call for lowering drug prices and opening regulatory barriers to competition.”
“America First Antitrust focuses on empowering the American people in the free markets, not enabling regulators and bureaucrats to prescribe outcomes,” said Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. “We are unleashing the new American Golden Age through antitrust enforcement that removes barriers to innovation and opportunity and limits regulatory burdens on free competition.”
The DOJ said its Antitrust Division has freed up deal flow by streamlining the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act (HSR) review process, in particular reinstating the practice of granting early termination in “uncontroversial” HSR reviews, as well as reinstating a willingness to settle merger reviews with “targeted and well-crafted consent decrees.”
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson also praised Trump’s rescinding of the executive order, saying the administration will protect against anticompetitive practices through “tailored action.”
The old executive order, he said, “encouraged top-down competition regulations, and established a flawed philosophical underpinning for the Biden-Harris Administration’s undue hostility toward mergers and acquisitions.”
He said the FTC is devoting its resources to enforcing antitrust laws passed by Congress.
The Trump administration’s move to axe the executive order drew a response from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-MN, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, who said the move is harmful to consumers.
“President Trump’s decision is a step backward for consumers, entrepreneurs, workers, and family farmers,” said Klobuchar. “It will lead to higher prices, fewer choices, and less innovation. The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission must vigorously enforce the antitrust laws, including by continuing to move forward cases brought under the last Administration. I will keep fighting in Congress to modernize our laws so competition flourishes, innovation accelerates, and American consumers are treated fairly.”
Email: jlagasse@himss.org
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