•Opponents of the bill include the Healthcare Leadership Council, business groups, health plans and insurers, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, the Democratic Leadership Council, nonphysician providers, the Consumer Federation of America, and conservative state legislators.  Key House sounded warnings of H.R. 1304's consequences.

Congress postponed this debate for good reason:  Medical cartels will only hurt consumers.

•Collective bargaining groups composed of self-employed competitors will be free to price-fix, boycott and engage in other anticompetitive acts, without accountability to any oversight body.

•The result: Even higher health care costs, more Americans becoming uninsured, reduced consumer choice, and less incentive to innovate and improve quality.

•The Congressional Budget Office now predicts that H.R. 1304 will directly reduce federal tax revenues by $3.6 billion and raise the costs to federal health programs by $2.5 billion over 10 years.  Also, "[b]y increasing costs to private health plans, H.R. 1304 would result in higher private health insurance premiums.  In the case of employer-sponsored health plans, higher premium contributions charged to employers would be passed on to employees in the form of lower cash wages and other fringe benefits."

Already, medical practitioners put patients at risk through anticompetitive conduct.  H.R. 1304 will only open the floodgates against competition and consumer protection.

•A group of Texas surgeons has settled Federal Trade Commission charges that they conspired to restrain competition.  Their price-fixing scheme caused patients, employers and health plans to incur more than $1,000,000 in higher costs for surgical services in 1998 and 1999.

•Wisconsin chiropractors settled FTC charges of price-fixing and boycotting.  The association of 900, or 90 percent, of the state's chiropractors conspired to increase prices and boycott third-party payers in order to obtain higher reimbursement rates.