[andjd]

I'm bothered by these half-measure enforcement actions. At the end of the day, the company is allowed to buy up 16 clinics but must divest of 6. At these numbers, it seems like if there is a threat of monopolistic market failure from the merger, then even with this countermeasure there is still a threat.

Leading into this is the obvious observation that a company forced to divest some of it's assets to comply with an order like this is incentivized to shed it's lowest-performing assets, and is also incentivized to sell them to an incompetent operator. This makes it likely that the divested assets won't end up being an effective competator.

Consider with the T-mobile/Sprint merger. One of the brands spun off as part of that deal has already ceased operations, and the other has negligible market share.

The oversight regulations are also odd. They are a tacit admonition that the resulting company has too much market power. If they have too much market power today, why would these restrictions sunset in 10 years? Sure, they may not have unreasonable market power that far in the future, but shouldn't the company have to petition to be let off of this oversight, e.g. to prove that they no longer are a dominant player with excessive market power?

It seems like the correct answer for the FTC when they address mergers like this it to just say no.