FTC launches multi-bureau Healthcare Task Force to spot 'new priority areas for enforcement'

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is launching a Healthcare Task Force to better focus its enforcement and advocacy on issues of competition and consumer protection within the industry, it announced Friday. 

The group will combine the teams and efforts of multiple groups under the FTC—the Bureau of Competition, the Bureau of Consumer Protection, the Bureau of Economics, the Office of Policy Planning and the Office of Technology—and potentially others from law enforcement and health departments, the agency and its chairman, Andrew Ferguson, said. 

“The Task Force will devise coherent agency-wide strategies on new and nascent investigations, institute a proactive and strategic approach to identifying amicus and statement of interest opportunities and conduct ongoing horizon-scanning exercises to identify emerging issues and new priority areas for enforcement and advocacy,” Ferguson wrote in a directive memo to bureau leaders.

The announcement and memo do not outline specific areas or issues the task force would be considering in its work. However, the FTC highlighted enforcement actions and outcomes it notched over the past year as “wins for Americans.” These include last month’s settlement with Express Scripts over insulin pricing, an abandoned merger of cataract surgery device makers that had been flagged by the regulator and two companies’ $145 million settlement of charges that they had misled consumers seeking to buy comprehensive health insurance, among others. 

Ferguson said the effort falls within the FTC’s dual mandate of protecting Americans “from unfair or deceptive practices and unfair methods of competition.” 

He also described the Healthcare Task Force’s launch as an initial step toward the administration’s goals of creating a “more competitive, innovative, affordable and higher quality healthcare system,” citing a February 2025 executive order primarily focused on price transparency policy. 

Ferguson’s FTC—which is currently led by just two Republican commissioners as opposed to its usual five, with a Supreme Court case pending over the firing of a Democrat-affiliated commissioner—has generally maintained its enforcement posture against specific healthcare deals it believes would upend local markets and reduce competition. 

That said, a cross-administration push to increase the information merging parties submit to the FTC prior to a deal faced stiff opposition from the private sector and was rolled back by a federal judge. The update was intended to help the regulator better spot transactions that could introduce competitive concerns, with a particular focus on horizontal deals the FTC said are more difficult to identify under prior standards. 

The chairman has also said on multiple occasions that he wants the regulator to take a tough stance on anticompetitive noncompetes within healthcare (while still refraining from the outright ban the agency pursued under his predecessor). The FTC has also been participating in broader Trump administration goals, such as a 10:1 deregulation initiative and a crackdown on gender-affirming care services for adolescents.