Polsinelli Shareholders Bobby Guy and Arindam Kar are no strangers to public and regulatory concerns surrounding private equity investment in healthcare. HCB News asked the two attorneys to tap into their dealmaking and antitrust perspectives to outline the state of healthcare investments today. We also get into how the election will impact current regulatory scrutiny, and the history of how the demise of the public markets have led to a reliance on private funding.
Bobby Guy believes that the uncertainty surrounding the US healthcare market presents the greatest investment opportunity in healthcare for the last half-century. He is a healthcare deal lawyer, and he spends his time focused on growing, buying and selling healthcare companies. In 2016 and 2017, he led the two largest skilled nursing spinoffs in the country each year, involving more than 30 buyers in 25 states in those deals. In the post-acute and behavioral space, his team has bought and sold more than 500 healthcare facilities in the last several years.
Arindam Kar is a thought leader who partners with clients to provide effective antitrust compliance solutions, pragmatic counseling, and results-driven resolutions to government investigations. Arindam also serves as outside general counsel to several emerging, innovative entities that are delivering solutions that impact industry and national security. Arindam’s legal service is provided alongside his passionate dedication to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in addition to servant leadership and community service.
HCB News: What’s the current environment for healthcare investment look like? Bobby Guy: Right now, we’re going through what we refer to as the “Transparency Tempest” in healthcare. Government agencies are applying significant scrutiny to healthcare transactions, especially investments by private equity into healthcare. Much of the scrutiny is coming from the Federal Trade Commission, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and state legislatures passing new laws that require pre-notification of healthcare transactions. At the same time, the Corporate Transparency Act, which affects US companies across all industries and is enforced by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the IRS (FinCen), became effective this year, so trends around transparency are coalescing. Here’s what each of these levels of government are doing, with Arindam addressing the FTC’s antitrust scrutiny to kick us off.
