Another merger settlement allows consolidation in health care; UnitedHealth’s lobbyist was MAGA’s biggest firm.View this email in your browser [link removed]

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**AUGUST 8, 2025**

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Private Prisons Cash In on Trump’s Mass Deportations [link removed]

GEO Group and CoreCivic are boasting of ‘unprecedented growth opportunities’ as they partner with ICE to surveil and imprison immigrants.

**BY WHITNEY CURRY WIMBISH** [link removed]

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The Redistricting Mess Shows How Our Election System Doesn’t Work [link removed]

With our winner-take-all elections, the ideal of a ‘fair’ map is impossible. Proportional representation is the only answer.

**BY DAVID DAYEN** [link removed]

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Saving FEMA [link removed]

Actual natural disasters might provide a reprieve for the broken agency.

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****Dayen on TAP****

**UnitedHealth merger approval again shows lobbyist power**

**Another merger settlement allows consolidation in health care; UnitedHealth’s lobbyist was MAGA’s biggest firm.**

As **I’ve been** [link removed] **reporting** [link removed], what was a promising start to antitrust enforcement in the second Trump administration has now become a pay-to-play operation where influential MAGA lobbyists paid millions by large corporations use their clout with the president and Attorney General Pam Bondi to overrule the enforcers and push through mergers. As a result, cases prosecuted but unresolved in the Biden years are under threat.

Yesterday, another leftover Biden case was settled, which will allow the **colossal UnitedHealth Group monopoly** [link removed] to swallow Amedisys, the second-largest provider of home health care in the nation, after already purchasing the third-largest provider in 2023. At a time when even investors are **begging off** [link removed] UnitedHealth’s consolidated business model, the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division saw no problem with the insurance giant eating a top player in one of the fastest-growing sectors in health care.

According to the Antitrust Division’s **press release** [link removed] on this, competition is preserved because UnitedHealth will be forced to divest 164 of its home health and hospice locations in 19 states. Reading the **settlement documents** [link removed], you find that the primary buyers for these divestitures are BrightSpring and Pennant. BrightSpring is owned by the private equity firm KKR, which was **literally sued by the same Antitrust Division** [link removed] in January for failing to notify about mergers with standard filings. BrightSpring itself has **faced allegations** [link removed] of poor quality of care for years. Pennant’s parent company had to **settle with DOJ** [link removed] over discrimination violations. So KKR and Pennant are being rewarded for their allegedly illegal conduct. (Incidentally, UnitedHealth tried to divest to BrightSpring and Pennant during the Biden years, but **Biden’s enforcers said no** [link removed].)

Divestitures like this are precisely what former Antitrust Division chief Jonathan Kanter **demonstrated don’t work** [link removed], with analysis that more than one-third of these kinds of remedies **fail to restore competition** [link removed]. That makes sense: It takes a lot of effort to build or bolster a new competitor when simply rejecting the merger would have a far less disruptive effect.

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There’s more. In the course of the investigation and lawsuit, DOJ uncovered that Amedisys lied about providing “true, correct, and complete” responses in the premerger filings, which are mandated under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act. This is essentially what the department is suing KKR over. So to resolve that claim, Amedisys must pay the whopping amount of … $1.1 million. This is a $3.3 billion transaction.

So why would the Justice Department let UnitedHealth make this purchase with such meager conditions? Maybe it’s because one of UnitedHealth’s many lobbyists is **Ballard** [link removed] **Partners** [link removed], which is the closest lobby shop to the Trump White House and the former employer of Attorney General Pam Bondi.

It’s just another data point in the **perversion of antitrust** [link removed] under Trump into a lobbyist bidding war. MAGA influencer Mike Davis is, according to

**The Wall Street Journal**, now working for Live Nation/Ticketmaster, after successfully getting Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s merger with Juniper Networks through. That settlement included a secret side deal for U.S. jobs that was not reported in **mandated disclosures** [link removed] under the Tunney Act. The judge in that case could use that information to expose the entire seedy pay-to-play side of these deals.

That could also be the case for UnitedHealth-Amedisys. The forced divestitures made this a settlement rather than a dismissal of the case, meaning that Judge James Bredar, an Obama appointee, could hold an evidentiary hearing, question witnesses, and seek documents to determine what role, if any, Ballard Partners or other lobbyists played in getting the deal done. The Tunney Act was literally created to prevent outside interference to enforcing the antitrust laws. This **obviously planted story** [link removed] at Breitbart about how Trump’s antitrust enforcers are merely “focused on predatory monopolies and Big Tech” is ridiculous; where does a monopolist like UnitedHealth, with its enormous power over people’s medical care, get slotted in, then?

Democrats in Congress are already **raising** [link removed] **opposition** [link removed] to the settlement for raising prices and reducing access for patients and suppressing wages, while also greenlighting the political favor-trading that antitrust has sunk into. It seems that if you’re a company and can pony up the money, you can get whatever regulatory treatment you wish. Bribery has gone in a few short months from a prohibited activity to the coin of the realm in Trump’s America.

**– DAVID DAYEN**

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