STAT September 30, 2021
Covid-19 caught the U.S. flatfooted. With supply shortages, the availability of intensive care unit beds, staffing challenges with nursing shortages, and physician burnout from witnessing thousands of deaths in isolation, the pandemic laid bare the amount of improvement needed in the hospital sector.
Looking back, the country would have been on better footing if it had made different decisions about competition a decade ago when the hospital industry successfully lobbied to prevent physicians from owning and operating hospitals and billing Medicare.
In the words of Federation of American Hospitals CEO Chip Kahn, “the current ban on [new] physician-owned hospitals wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for the Federation.” And yet, in the midst of the great suffering induced by Covid-19,...
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