Partners HealthCare will have to tread carefully on any future expansion, or risk a takedown attempt by Attorney General Maura Healey, a hospital expert predicted yesterday.
"If Partners keeps on attacking and capturing more land, the AG may say, you know these folks are out of control and they're far too big to allow competition to survive in Massachusetts," said Boston University professor Alan Sager. "If they continue down that road, they may well risk the AG suing to break them up into two parts."
Partners' options are limited after Superior Court Judge Janet Sanders rejected the deal allowing Partners to merge with South Shore, Lawrence Memorial and Melrose-Wakefield hospitals.
It can forge ahead with the merger anyway, engaging in a bare-knuckles legal brawl with an eager new AG. But that could take one to two years in the courts, not including any appeals, said Tasneem Chipty, an antitrust economics expert at Analysis Group.
"If you had two small organizations trying to merge, there would be no issue at all," said Chipty. "You only see close scrutiny, which could become litigious, in situations where one or both parties are quite big. Obviously, Partners is big."
Partners and Healey could also go back to the drawing board on an agreement more palatable to the court than the one former Attorney General Martha Coakley negotiated, but that would also likely be a multiyear process.
Partners could also abandon the deal altogether, or drop individual hospitals from the merger.
Partners CEO Gary Gottlieb is scheduled to step down July 1. It's reasonable to assume Partners would wait to make sure its new CEO is on board with whatever next step it chooses. Partners had no comment yesterday.
Still unknown is what Healey's takedown of the Partners deal could mean for other hospitals, including Boston Medical Center and Tufts Medical Center, which are in talks to merge.
Healey said yesterday she'll be watching the potential deal closely.
"If an agreement between Boston Medical Center and Tufts Medical Center is proposed, our office fully expects to review the transaction," said Christopher Loh, spokesman for Healey. "We remain committed to tackling the challenge of controlling health-care costs while also promoting quality and access."
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