Aurora Healthcare Antitrust Litigation

CASE BACKGROUND 

Advocate Aurora Health, Inc. (AAH) has allegedly engaged in anticompetitive methods to restrain trade and abuse its market dominance to foreclose competition and extract unreasonably high prices from plaintiffs Hometown Pharmacy and Hometown Pharmacy Health and Welfare Benefits Plan (Hometown) and other Wisconsin businesses, unions, and taxpayers.  

These abuses include unlawfully forcing commercial health plans to include in their networks all of AAH’s overpriced facilities, and aggressively blocking employers and insurers from directing individuals to higher value care at non-AAH facilities. AAH has allegedly suppressed innovative insurance products, such as tiered plans, that would reduce costs for employers. And it has used a combination of acquisitions, referral restraints, non-competes, and gag clauses to suppress competition from other healthcare providers and attempt to expand its monopoly over acute inpatient hospital services into other, separate markets. 

AAH has allegedly used its vast market power to engage in anticompetitive behavior that allows it to charge extremely high prices for healthcare services in Wisconsin. These prices would not be possible without AAH’s anticompetitive behavior and have resulted in Wisconsin employers, unions, and local governments overpaying for healthcare by hundreds of millions of dollars. 

AAH has used its unlawfully inflated profits to engage in an acquisition spree of competitor hospitals and independent facilities—a spree AAH has made clear it plans to continue in the years to come. These acquisitions offer AAH two self-reinforcing anticompetitive financial benefits: (1) the ability to impose higher prices at the acquired facilities than the previous owners could, and (2) even greater systemwide power that AAH can leverage to force employers and patients to pay higher prices at all of its facilities. 

Without intervention, AAH will continue to use anticompetitive contracting and negotiating tactics to raise prices on Wisconsin employers and use those funds for aggressive acquisitions and executive compensation. This will reduce economic growth in Wisconsin, harm patients and taxpayers, and drive employers out of Wisconsin. 

 

CASE FILED 

On May 24, 2022, the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, LLP and co-counsel filed a complaint in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin on behalf of plaintiffs Uriel Pharmacy, Inc. and Uriel Pharmacy Health and Welfare Plan (collectively Uriel) against defendants AAH and Aurora Health Care, Inc. (collectively Aurora). They filed a second amended class action complaint in the same court on October 2, 2023, on behalf of Uriel against Aurora. This case seeks to compensate the employers, unions, local governments, and other payers that have been directly harmed by AAH’s past illegal activity, and to enjoin AAH from continuing unlawful practices that harm Wisconsin’s economy and healthcare system. It alleges restraint of trade, unlawful monopolization, and unfair methods of competition, and seeks classwide damages and injunctive and equitable relief under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1, 2. 

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