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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowA vascular surgeon in Bloomington is suing Indiana University Health, claiming it unfairly revoked his hospital privileges and spread false information about him in an effort to dry up referrals and exert monopoly control in the market.
Dr. Ricardo Vasquez says he is the only independent vascular surgeon left in the Bloomington area and alleges that IU Health, the state’s largest hospital system, is instituting an “increasingly aggressive scheme” to acquire physicians in the Bloomington area to secure a monopoly in specialty services.
Vasquez filed suit June 11 in U.S. District Court in Indianapolis. His suit claims IU Health’s actions violated numerous antitrust laws. The suit also claims breach of contract and defamation. He is seeking unspecified damages.
IU Health declined to comment. The system owns IU Health Bloomington Hospital, the dominant hospital in the region, along with smaller hospitals in Bedford and Paoli.
The suit claims that IU Health controls 97% of primary care physicians in the Bloomington area after buying numerous practices over the years. The large health system thus controls where physicians refer patients.
According to the suit, IU Health revoked Vasquez hospital privileges in April 2019 “because he threatened IU Health’s monopoly” by opening an office-based laboratory to compete directly with the large hospital system in outpatient vascular surgery services.
Vascular surgery is a specialty in which diseases of the vascular system—arteries, veins and lymphatic circulation—are managed by medical therapy, minimally invasive stents and surgical reconstruction.
Vasquez also performed surgical procedures at the much smaller Monroe Hospital and at IU Health’s only competitor outpatient surgery center.
Despite having privileges elsewhere, Vasquez performed more than 95% of his inpatient surgeries at Bloomington Hospital and hundreds of outpatient procedures there until 2018, the suit said.
In addition to revoking his hospital privileges, IU Health also revoked Vasquez’ credentialing as an IU Health Plan participating provider, meaning that IU Health Plan patients are forced to pay out of pocket, at increased cost, to see Vasquez.
Vasquez claims that IU Health and its chief medical officer, Dr. Daniel Handel, have spread false statements about him and filed “meritless complaints” against him with the Indiana Professional Licensing Agency and the Indiana Attorney General’s office last year.
Vasquez earned his medical degree from the University of Iowa in 1996 and completed his general surgery residency at Mount Sinai School of Medicine-Cabrini Medical Center in New York. He moved to Bloomington in 2006 and subsequently opened his own practice, the Vascular Center and Vein Clinic of Southern Indiana.
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IU Health is known to be greedy and act in short-term self interest. I believe Dr. Vasquez.