SCHIP: For The Big Hospitals, Not The Children?

Yesterday I pointed to the NFIB's advocacy of the bill to expand SCHIP. Today, another major small-business organization--the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council--issued a press release taking the exact opposite stance:

The Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council (SBE Council) renewed its opposition to the vast expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) as legislation passed by the U.S. House and being considered by the U.S. Senate not only blows open a flawed and mismanaged program, but includes new mandates and options for states that will drastically drive up costs. In addition, the bill includes a protectionist measure that erects growth barriers for innovative physician-owned hospitals -- small to mid-size businesses in their own right that are providing patients with choice and access to efficient, high-quality health care.

That bit about physician-owned hospitals refers to a very poorly publicized subsection of the House version of the SCHIP bill. It would impose restrictions on the growth of physician-owned hospitals. Specifically, under the proposed legislation, you can't open any new ones, and any preexisting ones must get approval from the Health & Human Services secretary if they want to expand.  Other hospitals lobbied to get this restriction into the bill, arguing that physician-owned hospitals lead to conflicts of interest and increase health care costs by pushing patients toward certain types of treatment.

It's very possible that this provision could be stripped out of the final version of the bill. CongressDaily reported yesterday that physician hospital groups are meeting with Democratic constituencies now to convince them not to restrict them.

Note that this whole debate about physician-owned hospitals is completely tangential to the issue of expanding SCHIP. Can't Congress debate this issue on its own terms rather than let it be eclipsed by the SCHIP issue?