Requirements found in the Democrat’s health care reform bill will halt the construction of 60 doctor-owned hospitals. This is what happens when moral busybodies insist on injecting socialist policies on the free market.
The health care reform bill restricts new doctor owned hospitals from receiving payments from Medicare and Medicaid.
So first, the government sets up a program to take money from the rich doctors to pay for the care of old and poor patients, then they refuse to pay money to new hospitals run by the doctors they initially fleeced.
Also, the doctor-owned hospitals that are already serving patients can stay open, but they can’t get bigger without permission from the government.
Existing doctor-owned hospitals will be grandfathered in to get government funds for patients but must seek permission from the Department of Health and Human Services to expand.
To get the department’s permission, a doctor-owned hospital must be in a county where population growth is 150 percent of the population growth of the state in the last five years; inpatient admissions must be equal to all hospitals located in the county; the bed-occupancy rate must not be greater than the state average, and the hospital must be located in a state where hospital bed capacity is less than the national average.
The rules fall under Title VI, Section 6001 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The provision is titled “Physician Ownership and Other Transparency – Limitations on Medicare Exceptions to the Prohibition on Certain Physician Referral for Hospitals.”
This is the liberal’s idea of equality in the market. It isn’t enough that hospitals help patients, they have to help them equally. The government has to decide what the market needs, instead of demand for services leading the market.
Rather than the doctors who live in the community deciding there is a need for more beds, that community has to rely on a government bureaucracy to research the inpatient admissions of all the other hospitals in the county. To the government, quality of service has no bearing on hospital admissions. What matters is that a doctor owned hospital doesn’t have a bed occupancy rate greater than the state average.
This isn’t the free market. This isn’t how America is supposed to work. America is supposed to be a free country. This is tyranny, plain and simple.
In a free country, doctors would have the right to spend their own money to create a hospital to serve patients and earn a profit. This bill prevents that. How? The government has created a market where consumers are subsidized by government handouts. When given the choice between going to a new doctor-owned hospital and paying for everything themselves or going to an older state owned hospital and having the government pay, it’s clear what a consumer would do.
The government is driving customers away from one service provider and into the arms of another, who is possibly of lesser quality and ability.
The free market doesn’t work like this. The free market takes demand and allows doctors to decide whether a new hospital is needed or if a new wing will be profitable. The free market allows patients to choose.
This is centralized planning. This is the government deciding what the people can have, regardless of what supply and demand says.
Why would they even consider this? Isn’t more hospital beds a good thing, regardless who owns them?
Not according to the special interests who were supposedly absent from the writing of this bill.
Doctor-owned hospitals have long been a target of the American Hospital Association, which represents corporate-owned hospitals as well as non-profit hospitals.
An AHA study from 2008 says that physician-owned hospitals “lessen patient access to emergency and trauma care;” “damage the financial health of full-service hospitals and lead to cutbacks in service;” “are not more efficient than full service community hospitals;” “use physician-owners to steer patients;” “cherry pick the most profitable patients;” and “provide limited or no emergency services.”
The hospitals represented by the AHA stand to benefit from the absence of new doctor-owned hospitals. It’s no wonder they threw their support behind the bill.
The free market is slowly being replaced with centralized planning. It isn’t being done all at once. This is a slow revolution, so as not to draw the attention of the American people. It reminds me of another quote, one from Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party’s candidate for President.
He said, “The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”
How far a step is it to see the government restricting the construction of any new hospitals that are not state owned and run? If they create environments that restrict the ability of one group of free men and women to construct hospitals, then it’s not unrealistic to see them restrict another, and another, until all that is left is the state.
And when they have effectively nationalized health care, what’s next?
