What direction and changes might we expect for the Stark Laws? With the present economy it’s good to just see hospitals, no matter who owns them to be able to stay accredited and open in some areas. It will be interesting as well to see how the CCHIT standards hold, change, or what might be perhaps done a little differently too. Times change and maybe time for some laws to either change or be amended? Health IT needs some additional standards and needs to be affordable.
One large doctor owned hospital on the outskirts of Beverly Hills went out of business last year due to lack of money and could not get any investors and it was far from being a second rate facility, so perhaps we are seeing a change in the landscape today. BD
Desperate Hospitals - Century City Doctors Hospital (Los Angeles) begins shutting down, others file Chapter 11 to reorganize
Pete Stark is taking the fight to doctor-owned hospitals again, tying restrictions on the facilities to the kids’ health bill moving through Congress.
This isn’t wildly surprising, given that the Democratic Congressman last year told the Health Blog that physician-owned specialty hospitals are “second-rate” outfits that “cherry pick the easy and high-margin procedures to the financial detriment of acute-care hospitals.”
(This is the same guy, by the way, whose name graces the Stark laws, which restrict doctors’ ability to refer patients to facilities in which they have a financial stake.)
Doctor-owned hospitals — which typically specialize in fields such as orthopedics or cardiology — aren’t happy about the legislation, which would prohibit Medicare payments to new facilities and restrict expansion of existing ones.
Health Blog : Pete Stark vs. Doctor-Owned Hospitals
Related Reading: (with links to the entire series)
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