News Advisory: Doctors & Health Care Professionals To Speak About Insurance Industry's Anti-Trust Exemption

New Brunswick - Doctors, consumer advocates and other health care professionals will join with Congressman Frank Pallone, Jr. on Wednesday in a hospital forum to discuss the importance of repealing the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by insurance companies.

The forum will be held in Robert Wood Johnson's 2nd floor cafeteria in New Brunswick tomorrow at 3:30 p.m.

The health insurance industry has been operating over the last 65 years with a special immunity from the anti-trust laws designed to prevent price fixing, collusion and dividing up markets. Adequate competition has been cited as one of the principal causes of high costs.

In recent years, health care costs have escalated and the number of competing companies have dropped. In New Jersey, two insurance companies control 60 percent of the market.

Legislation will soon be introduced in Congress to repeal the exemption granting health insurers immunity from by the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945.