On/Offcall: It's Time to Repeal the Obamacare Ban on Physician-Owned Hospitals

Why are physicians banned from owning hospitals?

And why would repealing the ban help fix healthcare?

This week, we were honored to invite Texas Spine Care Center physician and nationally-recognized healthcare policy expert Dr. Adam J Bruggeman to contribute a thoughtful physician op-ed to Offcall about his work in Congress to overturn Section 6001 of the Affordable Care Act. 

If you’re not familiar with Section 6001, it’s the hotly debated provision that prohibited new physician-owned hospitals from participating in Medicare and froze expansion of existing ones. The stated goal was to protect patients, but according to Dr. Bruggeman, the policy should be judged on outcomes and the data is remarkably consistent: “Physician-owned hospitals are treating comparable or sicker patients and obtaining equal or better outcomes. Physician-owned facilities also tend to operate with leaner administrative structures and lower overhead than large consolidated systems.”

Dr. Bruggeman could not be more clear in his call to action: “Healthcare does not improve when competition disappears. It improves when patients have options and physicians have autonomy to build high-quality systems of care. Repealing the ban on physician-owned hospitals is not a partisan issue. It is a pro-competition, pro-patient, pro-community reform. Independent physicians remain one of the most stabilizing forces in American medicine. If we want a healthcare system that prioritizes access, quality, and affordability, we should empower physicians, not prohibit them from building effective healthcare systems.”

Do you agree that it’s time to overturn the ban on physician-owned hospitals?

Read and share the entire essay here.

And also reply directly or add your response on this topic in the comments!

How Doctors Can Find Their Social Media Voice and Fight Wellness Misinformation

👏 This week, we were equally excited to welcome Dr. Franziska Haydanek to How I Doctor. Dr. Fran has over 1 million followers across TikTok and Instagram, and now makes more income from her videos than what she makes clinically as an OB-GYN. As a medical content creator, she regularly uses her platform to explain women’s health clearly and also to call out misinformation on social media.

She and Offcall co-founder Dr. Graham Walker get real about how Dr. Fran has managed to build a growing social media business and what that means for the rest of us. Together, they break down:

👉 The economics of being a physician creator and how much money there is in health information
👉 The professional tension of earning more from creating videos than working in the clinic
👉 How we got here: Shrinking visit times that created an education vacuum which patients are instead filling with algorithms
👉 Whether clinicians have an obligation to show up digitally, in the spaces where our patients are
👉 How to build influence ethically — without compromising our license or integrity

👀 If you care about the future of medical authority in the digital age, this episode will challenge how you think about your role as a physician.

Listen to the full episode on Offcall (Also see the episode’s post on social media!)

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Physician Spotlight: Dr. Adam Brown

5 questions with Emergency Medicine physician, business school professor, start-up adviser, and Founder of ABIG Health Dr. Adam Brown (who was nominated by previous Physician Spotlight recipient Dr. Owais Durrani!)

1. Adam, you author a biweekly column “Prescriptions for a Broken System.” So what’s one policy reform that would truly change U.S. healthcare? If you read through “Prescriptions for a Broken System,” there’s a consistent theme: Consolidation. 

The scale of consolidation in American healthcare is staggering. Most people — including clinicians — don’t realize that between UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Cigna, and Humana, more than a trillion dollars of healthcare spend is concentrated in just four entities. And it’s not just insurance anymore. These companies own physician groups. They own PBMs. They own pharmacies. They own data infrastructure. They influence reimbursement, supply chains, technology platforms, and care delivery models. When you vertically integrate insurance, care delivery, pharmacy benefit management, and retail pharmacies under one umbrella, the power imbalance becomes enormous.

If there’s one reform we should be talking about more seriously, it’s meaningful antitrust enforcement and structural separation in healthcare. Transparency alone isn’t enough. We need to examine whether vertical integration at this scale is compatible with competitive markets and patient-centered care. Until we address consolidation, we’re rearranging deck chairs.

2. What’s one innovation in medical devices or U.S. healthcare startups that excites you most? The company I founded, ABIG Health, works with innovators from early stage companies to major international medical device companies across the spectrum, helping them navigate the complexity of the U.S. healthcare market — including AI-assisted decision support tools, physical medical devices, digital therapeutics. The creativity is remarkable. What excites me most isn’t a single gadget. It’s how technology is improving workflow, documentation, research synthesis, and patient engagement. We’re seeing tools that reduce friction for clinicians, accelerate clinical insight, and even reshape treatment modalities.