Five years ago, two hospital operators in northeastern Illinois—Evanston Northwestern Healthcare and Highland Park Hospital—merged. And flourished. Evanston upgraded its facilities and in just four years made more than $120 million in improvements to the Highland Park facility. They were the first to bring a heart program and a coordinated cancer-care program to their county. And earlier this year, their president Ronald Spaeth won the American College of Healthcare Executives' 2005 Gold Medal Award, the independent organization's highest honor.

But last Monday, in a typical government-style recognition of achievement, Chief Administrative Law Judge Stephen J. McGuire ordered Evanston-Highland to split, claiming that the 2000 merger "substantially lessened competition" and that there is a "reasonable probability" that further "harm [to] consumer welfare" will occur in the future. They have 180 days to comply.

The anti-competitive harm to which Judge McGuire referred was Evanston-Highland's price increases. Shortly after the merger in 2000, the regenerated company raised prices for many of its services. According to reports, the increases were "50 percent or more in certain instances, and in one case of inpatient care, as much as 200 percent."

If you are still waiting for a description of an actual crime, then you are going to be disappointed.

That is because the hospital's price increase was its crime, as charged by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, and as provided for under antitrust law. (Never mind that this is an industry in which costs have been rising for decades.) To repeat, its price increase was its crime, not any sort of negligence, fraud, or violation of contract.

In this antitrust conception, a price is not defined as the amount of money or goods at which two parties voluntarily agree to make a transaction. Rather, a price becomes "the extent to which a consumer feels he is being exploited by a producer." In 1986, when Judge Richard Posner upheld the Federal Trade Commission challenge to a similar hospital merger, he explained that the "ultimate issue" in the antitrust review of mergers is "whether the challenged acquisition is likely to hurt consumers, as by making it easier for firms to collude, expressly or tacitly, and thereby force price above or farther above the competitive level." That flaky bit of reasoning is presumably the legal standard by which the latest Chicago case was also judged.

In keeping with their disdain for producers and their fixation on the alleged intrinsic value of competition (a completely inessential aspect of either the economic or the moral case for capitalism), trustbusters literally pursue competition at any price. And to speak of exploitation, consumers vs. producers, and non-competitive competition? The antitrust laws make but a feeble attempt to conceal their Marxist pedigree.

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