AHA, others urge Congress to maintain current merger evaluation framework

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and 21 other organizations, including the AHA, today urged Congress to maintain the current legal and regulatory framework for evaluating mergers and acquisitions. 

“For the past forty years, this bipartisan framework has enabled rigorous competition, particularly in comparison to other parts of the world, while providing the government with the legal tools necessary to challenge transactions that could harm consumers,” the organizations said in a letter to leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary committees. “… Unfortunately, a narrative advanced by some critics ignores these facts and has spurred a dubious debate over merger policy. Some have cast aspersions on the process and legal framework under which mergers are reviewed and suggested policies that could deeply chill mergers and acquisitions activity, economic growth, and U.S. competitiveness. Taken to an extreme, such an approach could devolve to a point where, in many cases, the government would have to grant permission to private companies to engage in routine economic activity such as mergers, rather than the current well-established rule where mergers are presumptively lawful and economically beneficial absent evidence to the contrary.”