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Eric Arzubi: The Hidden Crisis in Healthcare Ownership and Leadership

Eric Arzubi/LinkedIn

Apr 21, 2026, 13:08

Eric Arzubi: The Hidden Crisis in Healthcare Ownership and Leadership

Eric Arzubi, Co-Founder Frontier Psychiatry and Assistant Clinical Professor, Yale Child Study Center, shared a post on LinkedIn:

”Lawyers can own law firms. Doctors cannot own hospitals.

You read that right.

ABA Rule 5.4 has protected lawyer ownership of law firms since 1983. Non-lawyers cannot own, manage, or share profits from a law practice.

Medicine has no such protection.

Only 5 percent of U.S. hospital CEOs are physicians. In 2010, the ACA banned doctors from building new hospitals at all. Section 6001 was a backroom deal. The American Hospital Association lobbied for the ban as the price of backing the ACA.

Physicians were traded away. Private equity walked in.

Here is what happened:

25 percent rise in hospital acquired conditions after private equity buyouts
18 percent cut to emergency room staffing budgets at private equity owned hospitals
Hospital assets dropped 24 percent within two years of private equity purchase
Average private equity hospital star rating is 2.5 out of 5

Here is what physician leadership looks like:

Quality scores 25 percent higher at physician led hospitals
Charges one third lower at physician owned hospitals
Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins are physician led for a century

Think about who suffers when the people who understand medicine do not control it:

The nurse whose staffing ratio was cut to protect a quarterly earnings report
The doctor who went into medicine to lead but now takes orders from an MBA who has never touched a patient
The rural town whose hospital closed because it was not profitable enough for investors

The AMA and more than 90 medical groups now back repealing the ban. Bills to lift it sit in Congress with bipartisan support.

But 15 years of inaction raises a hard question: is lobbying without power enough

We do not have a healthcare leadership crisis. We have a healthcare ownership crisis.”

Eric Arzubi: The Hidden Crisis in Healthcare Ownership and Leadership