FTC moves to block Inova merger
By Shannon Sollinger
The Federal Trade Commission, with Virginia Attorney General Robert McDonnell, is asking the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, in Alexandria, to issue a temporary restraining order to block the imminent merger of Prince William Health System with Inova Health System.
If the court agrees, the ensuing administrative trial at the FTC will take from 90 to 120 days.
Prince William Health System Chief Executive Officer Mike Schwartz said the merger of the 180-bed hospital in Manassas into the Inova system would “absolutely not” restrain competition and cause health costs to go up, as charged by the FTC.
The merger will give “access to resources to serve an ever-growing community and increase the quality and sophistication of our hospital,” Schwartz said.
HCA, for-profit hospital giant and parent of the 187-bed Reston Hospital Center, has been maneuvering to add to its presence in the lucrative Northern Virginia market, but an HCA officer said the company did not initiate this attempt to block the merger.
Schwartz said he fielded a preliminary call from an HCA spokesman “many years ago” about a possible sale or merger. He has not heard from them since, he said.
Tracey White, HCA vice president, said her company responded to an FTC subpoena and gave information about the health-care marketplace in Northern Virginia. HCA did not, she said, lodge a complaint.
HCA has broken ground on a 120-bed hospital in Spotsylvania county, and is four years into a battle to get approval from the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors to build a 164-bed hospital in Broadlands.
The FTC action will have no effect, White said, on HCA's application to build in Broadlands. That application is now before the county's Planning Commission.
Virginia Commissioner of Health Dr. Karen Remley last week approved a one-year extension of the Certificate of Public Need issued by her predecessor, Robert Stroube, for the Broadlands Regional Medical Center.
Those 164 beds are needed now – if not four years ago when the initial COPN was issued -- and they are needed in Broadlands, White said.
The National Nurses Organizing Committee, a union for registered nurses, and the Concerned Citizens of Broadlands, which opposes putting a hospital in that community, immediately criticized the extension. Remley's approval came in the face of the Health Services Agency of Northern Virginia's recommendation not to extend the three-year deadline for construction established by regulation, according to a press release from the two groups.