Groups of pathologists, anesthesiologists, radiologists, and ER physicians (PARE) followed, creating limited liability companies (professional LLCs) and becoming corporate contractors who sold their “physician services” to their former employers. Many did so even as they continued to work within the hospital. Emergency room physicians were the last to jump on board. When I worked as an ER doctor in the mid-1990s, we were all hospital staff. By 2014, 65 percent of the nation’s five thousand hospitals had contracted out their emergency department staffing/management function, according to
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