Posted on 04/06/2010 1:00:05 AM PDT by bruinbirdman
A group of lawyers can own a hospital. A group of hedge fund managers can own one. But doctors? Not after this year.
Big community hospitals supported the president's health overhaul. In exchange they are getting something they have desperately wanted for years: a ban on new competition.
The health overhaul was of course supposed to be about expanding coverage to the uninsured and slowing down the inexorable rise in health care costs, though the second goal was more talk than reality.
Buried in the hundreds of pages of legalese and footnotes are handouts unrelated to these two goals. The recipients are favored groups that went along with ObamaCare from the get go. Some of these groups got surprisingly little--doctors got neither tort reform nor a Medicare pay increase--but others got huge handouts. The AARP got the donut hole of Medicare drug plans filled.
Some of these handouts are harder to see and haven't gotten much attention but are extremely generous. One is to the hospital industry, for which the bill actually bans a potent form of competition. Section 6001 of the bill contains a measure that prevents groups of doctors from investing in new hospitals. A group of lawyers can own a hospital. A group of hedge fund managers can own one. But doctors, who would presumably know the most about starting a hospital, won't be able to after this year when the bill kicks in.
The back story here is long and interesting. (Check out Forbes' cover story on physician-owned hospitals from 2008: "Stop That Patient.") Big hospitals, represented by the nonprofit American Hospital Association and the for-profit Federation of American Hospitals, have long sought to limit competition from the doctors they employ. When a doctor sees a patient he generates two streams of revenue, a professional fee
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.forbes.com ...
Couple this news with outgoing Presidente Arias’s intention to reduce or eliminate import duties for expats, and I think they may be heading in an interesting direction.
Ha...0bambi already took care of that...
a new law on exchange controls over $50K...
was all over freeerepublic last couple of days...
Of course, to the liberal, life is secondary, abortion/death panels/cost.
The state is everything.
yitbos
btt
LInk, explanation? I don’t know what “exchange controls” are.
Another article coming out of Costa Rica:
http://www.insidecostarica.com/dailynews/2010/april/15/costarica10041505.htm
Not surprising. RK (for eyes) was 1/3 the US cost, last I checked.
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