Justice Department Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater recently helped secure two victories to ensure competition in health care and housing.
Slater announced that the Justice Department, along with state co-plaintiffs, reached a proposed settlement requiring UnitedHealth and Amedisys to divest from 164 home health and hospice locations.
She described this divestiture as the “largest ever settlement of its kind”:
Over the past few days, the DOJ Antitrust Division has achieved two important wins for American consumers in health care and in housing. First, we filed a post-settlement with UnitedHealth to sell at least 164 home health and hospice facilities across 19 states, making it the largest ever settlement of its kind.
By reaching this deal, the DOJ will prevent UnitedHealthcare from amassing an undue market share in towns and cities across states like Alabama, Maryland, Georgia, and Kentucky, and Tennessee. As a result of our action, hundreds of thousands of seniors and hospice patients and their families will continue to have affordable, high-quality options as essential care.
She added that American nurses “will also have employers competing for the vital work they do in their communities.”
In its second recent victory, Slater said the Justice Department Antitrust division secured a settlement to have Greystar, the country’s largest landlord, end its “algorithmic pricing scheme”:
In the second win, the Antitrust Division reached a settlement with Greystar, the largest landlord in the United States, which has almost a million housing units under management. In this settlement, Greystar has committed to ending its participation in algorithmic price scheme. Now, algorithmic price fixing may sound very high tech and convoluted, and in a way, it is, but it is also known as plain old collusion between competitors.
She continued, “As part of this collusion, Greystar coordinated with other landlords using an algorithm that generated daily rental price recommendations from their pooled confidential data. Greystar also tipped off its competitors directly regarding rental pricing. Under our settlement, Greystar must cease coordinating with its competitors, whether through an algorithm or directly.”
Slater emphasized, “Millennial Americans, who spend one-third of their monthly income on rent, will benefit from our settlement in particular.”
“We at the DOJ are proud to work for them to ensure that rental markets remain competitive,” she remarked.
“Is your rent too damn high? Millennial Americans spend one third of their monthly income on rent alone. Today, the DOJ took decisive action to make sure competition works in rental markets and your pocketbooks are protected from anticompetitive price increases. You’re welcome,” she wrote on X recently.
Slater has pursued these and other actions at the Justice Department Antitrust in furtherance of Trump’s “America First Antitrust” policies.
In July, the Antitrust Division submitted a statement of interest in a case alleging that big tech and big media organizations colluded to censor an organization founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the now-secretary of the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department.
Taylor Van Kirk, a spokeswoman for Vice President JD Vance, said that Slater, who worked as an economic policy adviser in Vance’s Senate office, is “whip smart” and a “valuable asset to the Trump administration.”
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on X @SeanMoran3.
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