Story here from CNS News. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Physician-owned hospitals are advertised as less bureaucratic and more focused on doctor-patient decision making. However, larger corporate hospitals say doctor-owned facilities discriminate in favor of high-income patients and refer business to themselves.

The new health care rules single out such hospitals, making new physician-owned projects ineligible to receive payments for Medicare and Medicaid patients.

Existing doctor-owned hospitals will be grandfathered in to get government funds for patients but must seek permission from the Department of Health and Human Services to expand.

[…]More than 60 doctor-owned hospitals across the country that were in the development stage will be canceled, said Molly Sandvig, executive director of Physician Hospitals of America (PHA).

“That’s a lot of access to communities that will be denied,” Sandvig told CNSNews.com. “The existing hospitals are greatly affected. They can’t grow. They can’t add beds. They can’t add rooms. Basically, it stifles their ability to change and meet market needs. This is really an unfortunate thing as well, because we are talking about some of the best hospitals in the country.”

The thing about communism that you need to understand is that it has to kill small business, so that individual consumers have no choice between producers.

A centralized government is much more capable of controlling the operations of a few large conformist oxen than a massive herd of independent cats. That’s why I think there is a lot of hostility to small business in Obama’s economic policies.  In particular, the health care mandates are designed to destroy small businesses, while the massive bailouts are designed to nationalize large companies. It’s straight out of the communist playbook.