Alex Olgin on NPR, Jul 2026
(from the article)- “Most states have laws requiring that doctors own medical practices, not corporations. These rules aim to put patient interests ahead of profit motives. Over the last several years, companies have used a model where a doctor technically owns the local practice, but as Erin Fuse Brown, a professor at Brown University, explains, those physician owners are often not involved in care and cede hiring, firing and other operational functions to the corporation.
Fuse Brown said these arrangements are attractive to hospitals because these companies often promise more revenue and take over the responsibilities that come with running an ER.
“There’s worry that these investors or these corporate management companies should not be totally controlling the operations and the clinical decisions of those who are trained to deliver patient care,” Fuse Brown said.
The connection to patient care concerned Dr. Jonas Pologe, who works for Eugene Emergency Physicians, in the Eugene, Ore., area. ApolloMD offered local doctors jobs, but Pologe worried that if he pushed back on decisions ApolloMD made, he could lose work hours.
“There’s certainly a chance that if you make enough of a stink, you think that something needs to change, they can just stop giving you shifts,” said Pologe.
ApolloMD’s CEO, Dr. Yogin Patel, said the group doesn’t infringe on the way its doctors practice. He says the company is being unfairly lumped in with broader concerns over physicians’ feelings of disempowerment at the hands of corporate medical takeovers.
A closely watched experiment
Fuse Brown, policy experts and independent physicians theorized that updating state corporate medicine laws could be a fix to limit the control management companies can exert over medical doctors.
Oregon’s the first state to try this, and the case brought by the Eugene doctors group is the first test of that law. McGee, who leads the Eugene physicians group, says colleagues at other hospitals around the state were literally tuning in to their case.
“You could hear it almost like background music on an elevator,” McGee says he was told. “At key moments, all of a sudden the nurses would break out in a cheer”…
