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No I've worked for corporations that owned hospitals, clinics and other medical services. After reading that AG opinion, it seems that there are some restrictions on ownership, especially sole proprietorships. But the medical practice itself always really relies with the individual licensed doctor.

So the revolutionaries fought to over through a national tyranny only to invoke a state tyranny?

If licensing physicians is so tyrannical, why haven't any of the 50 states done it differently? Maybe you're advocating chaos. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it tyrannical.

Why not a hospital across the street from another hospital?

Baptist, St. Thomas, Centennial(HCA), Vanderbilt and VA are all within a 5 block radius in Nashville. There is actually 25 hospitals in Nashville. 10 in the downtown area.

There are indeed boards that regulate it. But if you know your economics, you know that in any industry with sufficient profits, that profit is eventually driven to zero and probably negative, before industry rationalization kicks in and some competitors drop out. You don't want that with hospitals. You don't want to go to a hospital on the verge of bankruptcy.

So to attract the kind of intense capital investment that hospitals require, they do limit the competition some. But that's a state thing, not a federal thing. All you need to do is find a state that doesn't do that.

It probably stems from when Medicare reimbursed hospitals on a cost basis.