A legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act's restriction on doctors owning hospitals was foiled last week when the U.S. Court of Appeals in Houston dismissed an appeal from Physician Hospitals of America and the Texas Spine & Joint Hospital.
The appeals court dismissed the appeal saying that the district court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction. "...(T)he plaintiffs' burden is to allege a plausible set of facts establishing jurisdiction," the dismissal reads. "Thus, the plaintiffs carry the burden of establishing that statutory subject-matter jurisdiction exists and they have failed to do so."
PHA and the physician-owned TSJH have been seeking a repeal of the construction or expansion of physician-owned hospitals prohibition as laid out in the ACA's Section 6001.
PHA and TSJH, which had been in the midst of an expansion project that could not be completed within the statutory cut off in the ACA, sued Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, claiming that Section 6001 violates the Constitution's Due Process and Equal Protection clauses and is vague. The district court granted the secretary's motion for a summary judgment.
"The ever-evolving landscape of healthcare in the United States may one day prompt a new structure for judicial review in a case such as this," the appeals court judges concluded in their dismissal of the appeal, but "'the decision must come from Congress' and not from the courts."
PHA did not respond to a request for comment for this story.