Physician owned hospitals, an endangered species with new health care law? (lawyer, regular)

[aneftp]

amednews: Physician-owned hospitals: Endangered species? :: June 28, 2010 ... American Medical News

Talk about limiting choices. That's what the government will do. They will drastically limit the growth of physician-own medical facilities.

"New doctor-owned facilities that are not certified as Medicare participants by Dec. 31, 2010, no longer will be allowed into the program. Existing physician-owned facilities face immediate restrictions on expansion. Physician investors say those rules are so strict that virtually none of their hospitals will be able to grow."

This is the argument to limit physician owned facilities,

"For community hospitals, limiting expansion of physician-owned facilities was a vital piece of the health reform package. Other new regulations include capping physician ownership, ending some exceptions to Stark self-referral bans and mandating more disclosure of physician owners' potential conflicts of interest when they send patients to their own facilities."

The main issue I see is this limits business practices. In case you are wondering, this isn't going to save the government any more. Look at your local community "non-profit" hospital. They are loaded with non-clinical, what I call dead weight administrators who literally collect $$$$. Those guys are doing this for their own best interest. At any one local community hospital you've got 10-15 "mid managers" making over 6 figures. You've got CEOs of hospitals making in the mid six figure range. So it's not like the government will save any money. You are just cost-shifting the money away from physicians into non-clinical administrators. The cost will be the same.

Can you imagine a day when the government restricts if a lawyer can open up a private office? The government is essentially telling doctors they will not be able to take medicare patients in new physicians owned facilities. But the ironic thing is that physicians will just take all the private paying patients and flood the community hospitals with medicare patients.

[stan4]

The whole thing is screwy and examples like this just demonstrate that the real agenda with this bill is to make strides towards total government takeover of health care. O/w there would be no reason for provisions like this.

[aneftp]

Originally Posted by stan4

The whole thing is screwy and examples like this just demonstrate that the real agenda with this bill is to make strides towards total government takeover of health care. O/w there would be no reason for provisions like this.

I know. A lot of people don't understand this healthcare law.

What this law does is eventually restrict access to care. There will be no money saved. It's all cost-shifting. So many industries (lobbyists) have their hand in the cookie jar.

So you restrict a new surgery facility from opening (because often times denining them medicare care patient means losing 30-40% of revenues). So a medicare patient, instead of having to wait just a few days to have a simple procedure like a breast biospy, has to wait a couple of months at the local community hospitals because they are overbooked. What if it's cancer? Who knows? What about having to wait for a regular colonscopy. For screening colonscopies, the wait in Europe is up to 6 months. In the US, even if you are a medicare patient, they can get in within a week or so quickly.

[ovcatto]

Originally Posted by stan4

The whole thing is screwy and examples like this just demonstrate that the real agenda with this bill is to make strides towards total government takeover of health care. O/w there would be no reason for provisions like this.

Once again poor journalism seems to be the root of the problem because I couldn't figure out for the life of me what difference it made who owned the hospital until I came across this story:

Between 1990 and 2000, legislation began popping up against physician-owned facilities, and Mr. Gosney says this is likely because of the competition they created for hospital members of the Federal Association of Hospitals and the American Hospital Association. All of these various bills have now been overshadowed by the Patient Protection and Affordablee Care Act.

Becker's Hospital Review - The Future of Physician-Owned Hospitals

Which led me to ask the question, why do these associations oppose physician owned hospitals. Well the Federal Association of Hospitals represents for investor owned hosptials, so for them it is just a matter of using legislation to knock off the competition, but the American Hospital Association had this to say:

Limited-service providers, also known as “niche” or specialty providers, are not new, but the nature and pace of their growth is. They include heart hospitals, orthopedic hospitals, surgical hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs), cancer hospitals and centers, dialysis clinics, pain centers, imaging centers, mammography centers, and a host of other narrowly focused providers. The last decade has seen explosive growth in both inpatient and ambulatory limited-service providers, increasingly owned, at least in part, by the physicians who refer patients to them.

The AHA is very concerned that the growth of limited-service providers, if left solely to market forces, will undermine access to health care services for communities across this country.

So, I think that before you run off with the usual litany of Obama insults you would better off citing the lobbying "agenda" of the Federal Association of Hospitals and the American Hospital Association who have been fighting limited-service providers i.e., "niche" hospitals like the one sited in the story for years.

Is this a good thing, I don't know.

[stan4]

Whatever is the reason it's in there, it's HIS healthcare bill.

The government puts so many restrictions on hospitals that accept medicare, of course they're going to lobby against places that will cost them business.