Government sues hospitals for implementing Obamacare provisions.

[Quantum Windbag]

I am positive somebody will step in and tell me this story is not saying what I think it is saying.

Obama administration officials have been roaming the country, talking up their vision of a future in which doctors and hospitals team up to provide better care at lower cost. But a starkly different picture is unfolding this summer in a courtroom here, where lawyers from the Federal Trade Commission have been challenging a hospital merger in Toledo, Ohio.
The lawyers have put the transaction under a virtual microscope, taking hundreds of hours of testimony intended to show that the merger would stifle competition and drive up health care costs. In the process, they are scrutinizing details of the Toledo health care market that might seem more appropriate for investigation by state legislators or county commissioners.
Executives from the ProMedica Health System of Toledo and St. Luke’s Hospital in Maumee, a suburb, say their merger, which was consummated last August, will allow them to collaborate and provide care that is “more efficient and cost-effective” — an overarching goal of the new health care law espoused in scores of speeches by President Obama and administration officials.
The trial here, before the chief administrative law judge of the Federal Trade Commission, has implications far beyond Toledo. It illustrates the risks that arise when competing health care providers try to collaborate, as they are racing to do all over the country, in part because of incentives built into the new health law.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/us/22health.html

Personally, I am not at all surprised. The next time some idiot asks me why I think that the government cannot do anything right I will simply point at the government suing people who obey the law the government wrote.