Private practice physicians have come a long way; from riding horseback to patient’s homes, to practicing in a commercial building positioned at the corner of any busy street. With advancements in modern medicine, so comes the advancement in healthcare settings. No new physician, with miles of school debt, wants to take on the bureaucracy that is our healthcare system. There is a transition taking place and the expansion of hospitals and the focus on healthcare reform has caused private practice physicians to re-evaluate their career decisions. This is another chapter in the never-ending saga of the United States healthcare system. This assignment’s intent is to outline private practice physicians’ responses to healthcare reform and expansion of hospital facilities, and the positives and negatives that come with it.
Hospital expansion is a means to manage care and gain the upper hand when negotiating with health plans. Two popular hospital names are doing just that by increasing their footprint in North Alabama. In 2012, Huntsville Hospital acquired Lawrence Medical Center in Moulton, Alabama. In an article published by AL.com, the CEO of Huntsville Hospital
…show more content…
Interviewing physicians with prior practices, there was an understanding of where this sector was headed. Doctor Prem Gulati had his own private practice for several years. He fought health care reform and survived the strangle hold that community hospitals had on him, but folded under years and years of hospital expansion. He was losing patient volume to branch clinics, and could not keep up, so in the end he ended up working for the company that eventually bought his. This is not a bad thing, for it rids one of any stress owning a company and at the end of the work week there is a check waiting, yet there is a growing concern for quality of care in which hospital expansion can likely