Dive Brief:
- The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) told major companies that are seeking antitrust approvals at the American Antitrust Institute’s annual conference last Thursday to stop inundating them with cherry-picked and sometimes questionable economic data that amounts to "junk science."
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DOJ Acting Associate Attorney General Bill Baer said the agency would not be swayed by opaque analyses and simply trust the conclusions to be valid.
- The warning suggests DOJ officials are taking a harder line against megadeals in healthcare and other industries in which "substantial consolidation" is being sought, Bloomberg reported.
Dive Insight:
Last week's comments from Baer pressed for continued commitment in preventing anticompetitive mergers even as the Obama administration draws to a close.
Baer has specifically called out the health insurance industry's pending mergers of Anthem with Cigna, and Aetna with Humana. However, healthcare is not the only industry bracing for the possibility of massive consolidation.
Large agricultural chemical and seed manufacturers also require close scrutiny, Baer said. “Our assessments of competitive effects do not simply rely on quantitative evidence provided by expert testimony,” Baer warned.
His comments followed those earlier this month from David Gelfand, who recently left a post as a deputy assistant attorney general to go back to private practice. He's the one who accused experts of presenting "junk science" to support their cases.
“You need to be able to explain in simple terms the nature of the work you have done, the source of the information that feeds into that work, and why it demonstrates the point you are trying to make," Gelfand said at the Bates White Antitrust Conference. "It is not persuasive to rattle off technical jargon and expect us to take on faith that a conclusion is valid simply because you obtained some value for a statistic.”