Update July 2009: The court has certified a class of per diem nurses, but refused to certify a separate class of traveling nurses on the ground that their fee arrangements differed significantly more and thus common questions did not predominate.
In Jane Doe et al. v. Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association et al., Arizona District Court Judge Susan R. Bolton denied a motion for dismissal from a class action filed by Mayo Clinic Arizona, Phoenix Children’s Hospital and Scottsdale Health Corp. The hospitals’ motion sought dismissal of a class action suit brought by nurses in Arizona who accused Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association (AzHHA) and participating hospitals of operating a cartel and anticompetitively suppressing wages. In their complaint, filed less than two months after the U.S. Department of Justice launched a complaint against AzHHA alleging violations of federal and state antitrust laws, the nurses called the AzHHA’s registry program “an illegal and anti-competitive buyers’ cartel,” which conspired with hospitals to keep temporary nursing wages below free market levels. In denying most of defendants’ motion to dismiss, the court held that plaintiffs had standing to bring the federal antitrust claims and that the labor exemption in Arizona’s version of the Uniform State Antitrust Act doesn’t bar the plaintiffs’ claims. Judge Bolton also held that plaintiffs sufficiently established a plausible case of per se illegality by making specific allegations about the defendants’ alleged price-fixing scheme and by showing that the compensation rates set by the defendants were “below competitive levels.” Furthermore, the court rejected defendants’ “indirect purchaser” defense to the federal claims, holding that in order to determine whether the contracts fall within an exception to the indirect purchaser rule, the court would need to examine the individual contracts.