The issue of specialty hospitals is, at best, only tangentially related to CDHC. In fact, the rise of such hospitals is more a function of “physician-driven” health care than of CDHC. It isn’t the patients who decide to forego the local community hospital for the doctor-owned alternative. It is, instead, the physician-owners themselves who simply steer the best-insured patients in that direction.

I have my own reservations about the viability of CDHC, but they are based on the real issues surrounding that phenomenon: primarily the difficulty of making accurate outcomes comparisons between providers and the near impossibility of decoding the Byzantine cost and reimbursement structure of the health care system in general. Specialty hospitals are another can of worms altogether

The issue of specialty hospitals is, at best, only tangentially related to CDHC. In fact, the rise of such hospitals is more a function of “physician-driven” health care than of CDHC. It isn’t the patients who decide to forego the local community hospital for the doctor-owned alternative. It is, instead, the physician-owners themselves who simply steer the best-insured patients in that direction.

I have my own reservations about the viability of CDHC, but they are based on the real issues surrounding that phenomenon: primarily the difficulty of making accurate outcomes comparisons between providers and the near impossibility of decoding the Byzantine cost and reimbursement structure of the health care system in general. Specialty hospitals are another can of worms altogether