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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 Partners, 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 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 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 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 opposition 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.
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