Hey, Health Care Providers: Do What The Government Says, And Then They'll Turn Around And Sue Ya
Peter Suderman writes at reason that Obamacare was supposed to restrain the growth of health spending by encouraging medical providers to find better ways to coordinate the delivery of health care:

Highly integrated provider networks, encouraged and regulated by the federal government, would help make health care cheaper and better at the same time.

With the law's incentives in place, some providers are indeed working on mergers intended to help coordinate care. But it turns out that in some cases, they're running into resistance... from the federal government, in the form of Federal Trade Commission antitrust action. That's what's happening in Toledo, Ohio, where a hospital merger is taking heat from the FTC's antitrust enforcers. The New York Times looks at the latest round of docs-vs.-the-FTC and reports that ongoing legal battles illustrate "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."

What are those risks? For providers, it's that one arm of federal government will take them to court for following through on the collaboration incentives offered by another part of the federal government. For patients, it's that, despite the Obama administration's argument that coordinated care would make health care cheaper, integrated health networks afford providers new market power that in some cases can actually drive prices up.

More on the ridiculous government push-me/pull-you at the link.