Inside HSCA: HSCA Files Amicus Brief in Supreme Court Antitrust Case

HSCA Files Amicus Brief in Supreme Court Antitrust Case

The Healthcare Supply Chain Association (HSCA) along with leading antitrust and economics experts recently filed an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Third Circuit's decision to uphold an antitrust case by a manufacturer of truck parts against power management company Eaton Corp. In the briefing HSCA, warned that the Third Circuit’s decision threatens the volume-based member discounts that are vital to achieving healthcare cost savings, as well as the savings and purchasing efficiencies in countless other industries that rely on GPOs:

“To reduce their members’ supply costs, healthcare GPOs routinely negotiate contracts that base discounts on volume, participation levels, or the purchase of a particular product or products. For many small healthcare providers around the country, access to those discounts is vitally important to their mission (and to their bottom line). Indeed, it is why they join a GPO.”

“The Third Circuit’s decision threatens to unravel those discounts and other similar forms of price competition by raising the specter of antitrust liability for suppliers that offer deep (but non-predatory) participation or volume discounts and for the healthcare providers that seek them. The resulting uncertainty will chill price competition—the very conduct that the antitrust laws are designed to encourage—and could result in potentially devastating consequences for GPOs and for the many healthcare providers that already face vanishing profit margins, a sputtering economy, and mounting regulatory burdens.”

To read more from HSCA’s petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, click here