Mount Sinai CEO predicts no antitrust drama with Continuum deal

Mount Sinai Hospital CEO Dr. Kenneth Davis reportedly sees no antitrust bumps on his organization's path to absorbing Continuum Health Partners into what would be New York City's largest healthcare provider.

The Mount Sinai and Continuum boards just this week signed a definitive agreement. Davis, as paraphrased in the New York Times, said a regional office of the Federal Trade Commission had already given them the all-clear.

The size of the proposed transaction, though, requires a formal application for antitrust review under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act. The FTC has been keenly interested in hospital deals in the past few years. And the agency has been quite successful lately at scuttling ones it views as likely to lead to higher prices for patients, employers and insurers.

The union of Mount Sinai with Continuums hospitals would lock up most of New York City's West Side, said Matthew Cantor, an antitrust lawyer with the firm Constantine Cannon. “I think that the merger is going to be reviewed by the FTC and the attorney general in New York,” he said.

With St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village shuttered since 2011, Cantor says, New Yorkers living and working on city's West Side go to Continuum's Roosevelt Hospital at 57th Street or Continuum's St. Luke's Hospital at 114th Street if they need emergency care.

The next closest hospital, he noted, is Mount Sinai just across Central Park around 100th Street. The other option is New York Presbyterian's campus way uptown, at 165th Street.

The question antitrust authorities will examine, Cantor said, is the degree to which the Mount Sinai-Continuum merger is “creating even more of a must-have hospital system for insurance plans.” That would give the new not-for-profit hospital giant greater negotiating leverage with plans on rates.

And even though the massive New York Presbyterian Hospital will be no pushover even in a realigned competitive landscape, the market for emergency services is particularly inelastic. “If you have a heart attack,” Cantor said, “it's 'Get me to the closest hospital.' ”

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