> No, they’re effectively a monopoly for most of the services people actually need.
No, they aren’t. There's an argument that they may have been in the past, but the practices on which that accusation was based were terminated in a settlement with the state and when the same accusations went to trial in a federal lawsuit, Sutter won outright.
> They even settled an anti-trust lawsuit with the state a few years back.
That was based pricing power for insurance contracting through having must-have hospitals in some areas in Northern California and a system of all-or-nothing insurance contracts that required insurance vendors to make all of their hospitals in-network if it wanted any of them in-network, and other similar bundling. (Interesting, they won outright at trial a federal anti-trust suit on basically the same grounds that was proceeding in parallel, reaching court later, than the state one that they settled.)
And the settlement of the state suit addressed those practices, which is important to the current monopoly accusation, because the accusation in that suit was not that Sutter had a freestanding monopoly (market/pricing power) and illegally leveraged it (in which case, addressing the ways they leveraged it would be expected to leave the freestanding monopoly) but that it had market/pricing power because of the combination of must-have hospitals for insurers and the set of anticompetitive practices that leveraged that into market power.
No, they aren’t. There's an argument that they may have been in the past, but the practices on which that accusation was based were terminated in a settlement with the state and when the same accusations went to trial in a federal lawsuit, Sutter won outright.
> They even settled an anti-trust lawsuit with the state a few years back.
That was based pricing power for insurance contracting through having must-have hospitals in some areas in Northern California and a system of all-or-nothing insurance contracts that required insurance vendors to make all of their hospitals in-network if it wanted any of them in-network, and other similar bundling. (Interesting, they won outright at trial a federal anti-trust suit on basically the same grounds that was proceeding in parallel, reaching court later, than the state one that they settled.)
And the settlement of the state suit addressed those practices, which is important to the current monopoly accusation, because the accusation in that suit was not that Sutter had a freestanding monopoly (market/pricing power) and illegally leveraged it (in which case, addressing the ways they leveraged it would be expected to leave the freestanding monopoly) but that it had market/pricing power because of the combination of must-have hospitals for insurers and the set of anticompetitive practices that leveraged that into market power.