AAI’s Bradish Discusses Price Transparency and Algorithmic Competition at GCR Live

AAI’s Kathleen Bradish, Vice President and Director of Legal Advocacy, joined the panel at, Antitrust: Price transparency rules and algorithmic competition: another antitrust paradox or the latest instance of tacit collusion?, GCR Live’s Law Leaders Global 2025. From the description:

Recent rules require hospitals in the US to publicly post in machine readable files the rates negotiated with health insurance plans. These were carefully guarded secrets resulting from the bargaining between health providers and health insurance companies, which are now publicly available. The goal of the regulation is to increase price transparency to allow patients to better cross-shop for medical services and lower prices. Similar initiatives, often with regulatory or governmental mandates, are proliferating, which dovetails with broader, longstanding concerns regarding the line between tacit collusion and conscious parallelism.

The panel will discuss:

• Antitrust agencies’ concerns around price transparency and how it may favour price coordination – which seems heightened by the more widespread use of pricing algorithms that use publicly and sometimes private information to determine or at least suggest prices to rival firms.
• Similar instances of competing goals by different regulators that may lead to conflicts between antitrust goals and other public goals, and ultimately to the unintended consequences of higher prices and more market power.

Moderator: Dominic Thérien, Partner, McCarthy Tetrault

Speakers:

• Kathleen Bradish, Vice President and Director of Legal Advocacy, American Antitrust Institute
• James Fredricks, Partner, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom
• Joseph Harrington, Professor, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania
• Christian Horstkotte, Partner, Mayer Brown
• Miguel del Pino, Partner, Marval, O’Farrell Mairal