14. Department of Health and Human Services · Notable · Needs Congress
Remove ACA restrictions on physician-owned hospitals
Printed page 464 14. Department of Health and Human Services
“Remove restrictions on physician-owned hospitals. … These restrictions should be removed so that physician-owned hospitals can compete with other hospitals in serving Medicare patients.”
What has happened
- Not started
Section 6001 of the Affordable Care Act still bars new physician-owned hospitals from the whole-hospital exception to the physician self-referral law and caps expansion at existing ones. H.R. 4002, the Patient Access to Higher Quality Health Care Act of 2025, would repeal it; it was referred to committee on 2025-06-12 and has had no further action. Under the Requires-Congress ladder, introduction is not action. Negative search recorded in `docs/research/ch-14.md` under the round-2 (ticket 16) cluster searches.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- Searched: the titles of the bills we keep and search, for “physician-owned”, “physician owned” or “Patient Access to Higher Quality Health Care” → one bill (H.R. 4002, referred). Federal Register “physician-owned hospitals” since 2025-01-20 → 3 documents (the CY 2026 OPPS final rule and the FY 2027 IPPS proposed and final rules), all of which mention physician-owned hospitals only in passing; the FY 2027 IPPS final rule text was read and its single occurrence is in a list of comment submitters.
- Among the public laws of the window that we keep and search, from congress.gov, none touches ACA § 6001.
- Action
- repeal
- Object
- ACA restrictions on physician-owned hospitals
- ID
- 1260