The Dallas Morning News once reported that Dallas-Forth Worth has more physician-owned hospitals than any other metro area. About 9.7 percent of the country’s physician-owned hospitals are in the area, and Texas itself has the highest rate in the country.
Opponents of physician-owned hospitals are concerned that doctors may base medical decisions on how much money they’ll make and that such facilities create conflict of interest issues that could put patients in danger. For these and other reasons, the American Hospital Association wants to ban physicians from referring patients to their own hospitals.
The AHA may have gotten its wish. According to Investors.com, the new health care reform law limits physician-owned hospitals to the point of effectively banning them:
Under the new law there are a host of bureaucratic hoops that physician-owned hospitals must go through to expand.
• The hospital must apply to the Department of Health and Human Services and can do so only once every two years.
• It must then wait for a period for members of the community to provide input.
• It must be in a county where population growth is 150% of the population growth of the state in the last five years.
• Inpatient admissions must be equal to or greater than the average of such admissions in all hospitals located in the county.
• Its bed occupancy rate must be greater than the state average.
• It must be located in a state where hospital bed capacity is less than the national average.
• Once a hospital meets all of those conditions, it is prohibited from expanding more than 200%.
Molly Sandvig, executive director of Physician Hospitals of America, said “Here we are with additional requirements for insurance and access, but we don’t have the physicians and infrastructure to treat all these people.”
The health care overhaul also will exacerbate the shortage of primary care physicians. Some parts of the country are seeing severe shortages, and the problem will get worse as the new law adds millions of new patients for overburdened doctors.
