You Heard Obama Mention The Wonderful Cleveland Clinic During The Debate? This Type of Clinic Would Not be Allowed under Obamacare.
Liberals say the funniest things part 678
Editors Note: After this was published a reader wrote in to say that Cleveland Clinic is NOT physician owned as it says here. Read his comment at the end of the original posting. If anyone else has any more info on this let us know. Thanks to our reader, Bob, for pointing out the way that Cleveland Clinic is set up. ZTW
Obama made a reference to the Cleveland Clinic during last weeks debate. He praised the clinic, but, he forgot to mention one small detail, a detail Chris caught That clinic would be illegal under ObamaCare
Standing up for his health care law during last night’s debate President Obama cited the Cleveland Clinic as a “model” for how Obamacare should be implemented nationwide.
But there’s only one small problem with that. Something my blog bud Proof pointed out in the commentsto my debate post.
I think it deserves to be highlighted, maybe in an ad from the RNC. Because it’s a doozy.
The Cleveland Clinic is owned by doctors. But thanks to Obamacare it’s illegal for doctors to own hospitals.
Section 6001 of the health care law effectively bans new physician-owned hospitals (POHs) from starting up, and it keeps existing ones from expanding. It has already halted the development of 24 new physician-owned hospitals and forced an additional 47 to struggle to meet the deadline to complete construction, according to the Physician Hospitals of America (PHA).
You couldn’t build the Cleveland Clinic today if you wanted to.
Wow! What an indictment for Obama’s health care bill. Of course it is possible Obama did not know, I mean the bill is so massive, no one knows everything that is in it! More here
As Politico reports, “Physician Hospitals of America says that construction had to stop at 45 hospitals nationwide or they would not be able to bill Medicare for treatments.”
Jeffrey Anderson, at the Weekly Standard
This little-noticed but particularly egregious aspect of Obamacare is, by all accounts, a concession to the powerful American Hospital Association (AHA), a supporter of Obamacare, which prefers to have its member hospitals operate without competition from hospitals owned by doctors. Dr. Michael Russell, president of Physician Hospitals of America, which has filed suit to try to stop this selective building-ban from going into effect, says, “There are so many regulations [in Obamacare] and they are so onerous and intrusive that we believe that the section [Section 6001] was deliberately designed so no physician owned hospital could successfully comply.”
Artz writes, “According to Russell, the AHA, along with Sen. [Max] Baucus (D-MT) and Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA), are responsible for the language in Section 6001.”
Is anyone really surprised that such garbage is in this bill. Such items will hurt, not help make health care better, but they will benefit the AHA, and sellouts like Baucus and Stark.
From The Daley Gator: http://thedaleygator.wordpress.com/
Thanks for correcting and clarifying that Bob. That story was from a news site. ZTW
The Cleveland Clinic is NOT a “physician-owned” hospital. The Clinic was incorporated in 1921 as an Ohio nonprofit corporation; as such, there are no shares and no “owners” who receive dividends. The corporation is governed by a Board of Directors that may not personally profit (receive dividends) from the hospital’s operation. In point of fact, every physician at the Clinic is an employee, NOT a partner or shareholder. Such a structure is not prohibited in any way by the Affordable Care Act, i.,e., Obamacare.