Hospital Giant Accuses Analytics Company of Price-Fixing Scheme (1)

A major hospital operator has accused a health-care analytics firm of orchestrating a nationwide price-fixing conspiracy with nearly all of the country’s top health insurance companies to underpay providers for out-of-network services.

In an antitrust complaint filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, Tennessee-based Community Health Systems Inc. alleges that provider network operator Multiplan Inc. devised and implemented an anticompetitive scheme using proprietary pricing algorithms to underpay the hospital group by hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of its health plan clients.

The lawsuit claims that prior to the alleged conspiracy, MultiPlan and ...