Their main contention is that Sutter tried to use its market power in the uncompetitive areas to charge higher prices in the competitive regions as well, the majority said.
“To do so, around the turn of the millennium Sutter began contracting with health plans on a ‘systemwide’ basis, meaning that one contract governs the relationship and imposes common terms between a health plan and all Sutter providers,” the opinion states.
That systemwide contracting ultimately gave Sutter more leverage in negotiations with health plans and became the way in which Sutter imposed the allegedly anticompetitive contract terms, the purchasers claim.
The district court determined 2006 to be the cutoff date for evidence, reasoning that Sutter’s systemwide contracts were renegotiated regularly and the contracts they had alleged were negotiated around 2011, according to the majority. But that reasoning “conflated plaintiffs’ theory of liability with any damages to which plaintiffs would be entitled if they prevailed at trial,” the majority said.
