ObamaCare Strangles Physician-Owned Hospitals
According to the Physician Hospitals of America trade group, passage of ObamaCare will have the following effects on physician-owned hospitals:
- Hospitals currently under construction but without a Medicare Provider Number by August 1, 2010 are not grandfathered under the law. It is not clear whether those hospitals will ever be able to receive Medicare certification.
- Physicians may not increase their share of ownership in their hospitals.
- Physician-owned hospitals must meet 4 specific requirements in order to be allowed to apply to Health and Human Service to add beds, operating rooms, or procedure rooms. According to the trade group, no existing hospitals meet those requirements, so no physician-owned hospital will be able to grow after tomorrow.
Does Congress believe that anyone, even the Los Angeles County Commissioners (see “A Tale of Two Scandals”) would do a better job of running a hospital than entrepreneurial physicians? Or is it just not up to the job of running health care for 300 million people?
Hat tip to Greg Scandlen.
This is a shame.
One more spear in the side of any effort at real cost control.
Denying hospitals the right to specialize make no economic sense.
The whole bed-approval process makes no sense whatsoever.
Has anyone analyzed the implications of the combined ban on denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, and the low penalty for those who shun health care insurance?
There must be something I don’t understand about the changes requiring insurers to cover those with pre-existing conditions. Otherwise there is a powerful incentive for the healthy middle class to drop insurance entirely and purchase it only when they get seriously ill, and for those making over, say, $150,000 a year to at least drop coverage for 3 months out of the year.
Will insurers be allowed to charge more for new insurees with pre-existing conditions?
Josh,
There are a group of states that adopted guaranteed issue (required coverage of anyone no matter what his health status) in the 1990s. If guaranteed issue is required without premium regulation then “health insurance” becomes a sickness pool and rates reflect the costs of having a major illness. New Jersey is a case in point.
If price controls are applied in states with guaranteed issue, insurers leave the market because the state typically sets prices that make it impossible to make a profit selling health insurance. Massachusetts and New York are good examples of this. Massachusetts idividual “insurance” via the Connector exchange is nothing more than groups of local providers arranged in an HMO format.
Academic research seems to show that guaranteed issue results in a drop of the rate of people with insurance as the price increase encourages more healthy people to drop coverage than previously uninsured to take it up. The best solution to the problem so far seems to be the state high risk pools.
See http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2009/Gormanhealthinsurance.html for more on the academic work on the subject.
[…] and in many cases impossible, to enter the field or expand if they are already in place (see here and here). The overall cost of this situation will be fewer hospitals to accept the new increase in […]
LOL, did you read the article? The tax is to help fund Medicare, not those using it.The amonut of fraud is not nearly 20%, come on now. Show me a reference that says that and is not Fox News.Requiring most people to get insurance is how they are going to help pay for this. It doesn’t work if most people don’t have insurance. The healthy people subsidize the sick.