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ACA said to mostly block new physician-owned hospitals

 

Affordable Care Act (ACA)  regulations effectively halted the creation of physician-owned hospitals, researchers say.

But the trade association Physician Hospitals of America (PHA) says that conclusion is largely incorrect.

Elizabeth Plummer, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Accounting, Neeley School of Business, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, and William Wempe, Ph.D., an associate professor in the department, studied 106 physician-owned hospitals in Texas, where about 20 percent of the hospitals have this model. They compared them with a control group of hospitals not owned by physicians to see their response to ACA rules.

Medscape noted that proponents of physician-owned hospitals say that patient satisfaction is high and that “they are well-positioned to improve care and population health and reduce costs; critics say they have incentives to order excessive tests and improperly refer patients to facilities in which the physicians have financial interests.”

The researchers wrote: “Moreover, physician-owned hospitals may cherry-pick the marketplace to secure patients with good general health who seek specialized and highly profitable medical treatment, reducing other hospitals’ bottom lines and their ability to provide indigent care.”

To read the Medscape article on this, please hit this link.

 


Physician-owned Texas hospital asks to expand

rockwall

Rockwall County Courthouse.

It seems that we usually read about hospitals with too many beds in these days of burgeoning outpatient services and hospital consolidation. But Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Rockwall, in Rockwall County,  in Greater Dallas, wants the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services to let it increase the number of beds.
County  officials and other residents say Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Rockwall needs to grow to catch up with a big local population  increase and to prepare for natural disasters, particularly flooding and tornadoes.
The hospital, part of physician-owned Texas Health Resources, wants to increase the number of operating rooms and other procedure rooms, and double the number of its licensed beds to  120.  The physician-owned hospital’s occupancy has jumped dramatically and is one of only two hospitals in Rockwall County, hospital President Cindy Paris told HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell.
Big hospital systems, worried about over-capacity and seeking to reduce competition, lobbied Congress to include an amendment in the Affordable Care Act to  bar physician-owned hospitals from expanding their existing facilities unless the HHS secretary deems it beneficial to the community.
“Rockwall County is expanding and it is important that our hospital be able to support our community as well as surrounding communities that don’t have hospital facilities yet,” Rockwall resident Kim Iles said in a comment letter to HHS. 

Are rules on doctor-owned hospitals too tough?

 

A U.S. House subcommittee is looking at whether rules for physician-owned hospitals should be lessened  because the rules may be stunting their growth.

The hearing Tuesday,  chaired by U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady (R.-Texas), was entitled “Improving Competition in Medicare: Removing Moratoria and Expanding Access,” participants. It  discussed a  rule  under the  Affordable Care Act that keeps physician-owned hospitals from expanding and keeps new physician-owned hospitals from treating Medicare and Medicaid patients.

“It is our responsibility to protect Medicare for today’s seniors and for future generations — increasing competition in the marketplace can help achieve that. We will continue to hold hearings on improving the payment system for hospitals and other healthcare providers over the course of this year and develop reforms that will help save Medicare for the long term,” Mr. Brady told the session.


Physician-owned hospitals keep getting blocked

 

The Affordable Care Act bans new physician-owned hospitals (about 7o facilities) and expanding their existing facilities unless specifically approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
So far they’ve been overwhelmed by lobbyists from the American Hospital Association and the Federation of American Hospitals, which of course don’t want the competition.Andrew Wachler, managing partner with Wachler & Associates law firm,  told Modern Healthcare that the central argument of the opposition was that  physician-owned hospitals would  “cherry pick” patients who needed such high profit-margins treatment as orthopedic surgery.


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