They sure don’t look like price-fixers.
Say a company offers to negotiate fees for you and other members of your profession. You and many of your colleagues say fine, knock yourself out. The negotiator then asks each of its client-professionals to name her minimum price for performing specific services. It collects the pricing data and uses the resulting mean and median prices as minimums in negotiating fee contracts with the people who pay the client-professionals’ bills.
Does that sound like price-fixing to you? It did to the Federal Trade Commission — and also to the Fifth Circuit.
Like the FTC, the court concluded that North Texas Specialty Physicians’s compilation of minimum acceptable prices into an amalgam th at it then used in contract negotiations aimed to raise prices above the competitive level. Sure, the court noted, fancy-pants doctors didn’t have to take the price that NTSP bargained with payors (like insurance companies and HMOs) for; but a good many of the healers ended up with more money in their scrubs than they would have taken but for the joint effort to raise the general price level. Federal Trade Comm’n v. N. Texas Specialty Physicians, No. 06-60023 (5th Cir. July 17, 2008)
By the way, the court issued its original opinion on May 14, 2008, but sent it out again after revising it — per usual — in ways the opinion doesn’t disclose. Blawgletter hates when that happens.
