In United States the Congress had passed the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003 or MMA and with this imposed a stoppage for 18 months on the starting of new physician owned specialty hospitals. At the same time, they also wanted to know the position regarding certain matters of physician owned heart, orthopedic and surgical specialty hospitals through MedPAC. The team visited sites, made legal analysis and met the share owners in these hospitals and finally presented a report to the Congress. It had also gone through the cost reports received from Medicare and inpatient claims of 2002, which was the most recent at that time. This will naturally form the basis of such hospitals being permitted or not. (Physician-owned specialty hospitals).

             Findings of MedPAC: .

             The findings of this committee showed that:-.

             Physician owned hospitals generally treated patients who had less severe problems and concentrated on specific diagnosis related groups and the reason for both of this was that these were expected to be more profitable than other patients.

             These hospitals do not treat as many Medicaid patients as community hospitals.

             Regarding the costs of patients in these hospitals for the patients, the Medicare patients did not get benefits of lower costs though the inpatients had shorter periods of stay.

             There was no appreciable impact of physician owned specialty hospitals on the community hospitals as seen in 2002, and there was also no impact on the financial performance of the community hospitals. .

             Most of the differences in profitability can be rectified by improving the prospective patient system for inpatients that are made by Medicare. .

             Thus according to the findings there are not major differences between the community hospitals and physician owned specialty hospitals in terms of costs or capability for services. (Physician-owned specialty hospitals).

             Differences among types of hospitals: .