Fresh off a great Private Practice Section Meeting in Washington D.C. last week.  For all of you in private practice, this is the meeting to get you rejuvenated.

While the medicare “black cloud” referenced in my prior post preceded the meeting, the most interesting news was the determination of California Legislative Counsel that it is illegal for PTs to be employed by any professional corporation except those owned by PT’s and Naturopaths (keep the Naturopath jokes to yourself).

This is monumental news on many fronts as clearly there are a great number of PT’s employed by docs that are getting notified that they need to seek employment somewhere else.

What I haven’t been able to find out is whether this will preclude the different shades of POPTS, namely malcontent companies like this one and this one whose sole business function is to contract with physicians and put private PT clinics out of business.  In fact, they often recruit  employed PT’s from private practices thru rather questionable tactics.  These groups invent their own national associations like the Ethical Physical Therapy Association in an attempt to legitimize what they are doing.  Lest you think these are opportunistic venture capital corporate folks-think again.  Most of the time they are PT’s and their henchmen posing as concerned advocates of physician’s falling reimbursement.   These companies aggressively go after physicians and seemingly always have some type of sanctimonious name associated with them like “integrity” or “ethical” or “unique”.

I hope that instead California physicians with in office PT see this as an opportunity to divest honorably during a time that medicare reimbursement is declining, regulations even more burdensome, and awareness that conflict of interest relationships are on the clear radar screen of CMS.

Stand strong California.

larry@physicaltherapist.com

The contents of this blog post are my opinion.