Breaking Up Health Care Conglomerates—The Right Fix Right Now?

Recently, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced the Break Up Big Medicine Act (BUBMA), a bipartisan bill intended to break up health care conglomerates. Conglomerates exist in other sectors, including technology, media and entertainment, and retail and consumer products, where broad, federal antitrust statutes provide a primary, if increasingly strained, framework for addressing market power. Although Congress and federal agencies have previously supplemented antitrust enforcement with sector-specific regulation requiring the forced breakup of integrated firms in an industry—notably in the 1930s after systemic bank failures and the Great Depression—the BUBMA is unusually sweeping, raising the question, is big medicine harmful enough to justify a legislative remedy of this magnitude?