Specialty Hospitals (except Psychiatric and Substance Abuse) — U.S. Industry Primer

NAICS 2022 code 622310. A Histometrics industry primer for public-market and private investors. NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System, the U.S. government's standard for grouping businesses.

1. Overview

This industry is the set of freestanding U.S. hospitals that focus on one type of patient or condition rather than offering the full range of general acute care. In practice that means four very different kinds of institutions under one code: inpatient rehabilitation hospitals (recovery from stroke, brain and spinal injury, joint replacement), long-term acute care hospitals (patients who need weeks of intensive care, such as ventilator weaning), and freestanding children's and cancer hospitals.[1]

This is a healthcare-delivery industry, not simply a stock-market sector. Post-acute and specialty care is a large, aging-demographic-driven, and heavily reimbursement-governed slice of U.S. health care. Owners do not set their own prices across most of this market — Medicare (federal insurance for people 65+ and some disabled) and Medicaid (federal-state insurance for low-income patients) do — so the economics turn on federal payment policy as much as on operations.

Two routes in. Public-market investors have essentially one large pure-play left — Encompass Health, the biggest rehab-hospital operator — plus diversified hospital companies, an alternative-asset manager, and a real-estate landlord with specialty exposure (Section 4). Private investors meet the industry as private-equity-backed long-term-acute-care and rehab platforms, joint ventures with local health systems, facility real estate and private credit, and — for the large children's and cancer institutions, which are almost all nonprofit or public — the tax-exempt municipal-bond market rather than equity.

2. What it is and how it's structured

Specialty hospitals provide licensed inpatient care — beds, specialized staff, equipment, food service — for a particular disease, condition, or recovery need; many also run outpatient clinics, imaging, labs, operating rooms, and therapy.[1]

In scope (freestanding, single-focus hospitals):

• Inpatient rehabilitation facilities (IRFs) — intensive physical, occupational, and speech therapy after a qualifying event.
• Long-term care hospitals (LTCHs, also called long-term acute care or LTAC) — extended intensive care for medically complex patients.
• Children's specialty hospitals — pediatric tertiary care (oncology, cardiology, neurology, surgery).
• Cancer / oncology hospitals and other single-condition hospitals (heart, orthopedic, women's, surgical-specialty).[1]

Explicitly excluded — this code is narrower than "hospitals that aren't general":

• General medical and surgical hospitals → NAICS 622110 (the ~$1.4-trillion core hospital sector).[1]
• Psychiatric and substance-abuse hospitals → NAICS 622210 (removed by the code's own title). This is why psychiatric-focused operators are not clean comparables for this code (see Section 4).[1]
• Ambulatory surgery centers (day surgery, no overnight stay) → NAICS 621493. Many "surgical" facilities the press calls specialty hospitals are actually outpatient centers and sit outside this code.
• Nursing / skilled-nursing facilities → NAICS 623110; residential intellectual-and-developmental-disability facilities → 623210; doctors' offices → 621111.[1]

The boundaries matter: a rehabilitation hospital falls in 622310, but a nursing facility that offers rehabilitation generally falls under 623110. And a great deal of specialty care — a cancer center, a rehab unit, a NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) — is delivered inside a general hospital as a department, and is therefore counted under 622110, not here. NAICS 622310 captures only the freestanding specialty hospital.

Ownership mix. The four sub-segments split cleanly by ownership:

• Rehab and LTAC are dominated by for-profit chains (Encompass Health, Select Medical, and private-equity-backed platforms such as ScionHealth, PAM Health, Ernest Health, and Vibra Healthcare).[6][7][14][16][17][18]
• Children's and cancer hospitals are overwhelmingly nonprofit, academic, or government-owned (for example, MD Anderson is part of the University of Texas system; most large children's hospitals are 501(c)(3) nonprofits such as Texas Children's and Shriners Children's).[9][19]

A clean federal ownership percentage for 622310 specifically is not published in our figures, and Census firm counts should not be read as ownership counts.[5]

3. How big it is

Federal business statistics for NAICS 622310 (our ground-truth figures):

So the measured industry is roughly 1,000 freestanding hospitals, ~296,000 workers, and ~$58 billion in annual receipts. Reported payroll (~$23.4B, 2023) is about 40% of reported receipts (~$58.4B, 2022) — and once you add benefits and contract/agency staffing, total labor runs higher still. Labor, not pricing, is the swing cost here.

Coverage caveats — read these before using the headline numbers:

1. Two surveys, two years, two universes. Establishments, employment, and payroll come from CBP 2023; receipts, firms, and concentration from the 2022 Economic Census; the size standard from the 2023 SBA table. Don't blend them into a single same-year snapshot.[1][2][3][4]
2. Government hospitals are handled differently by the two surveys. Hospitals (NAICS 622) are an explicit exception to CBP's usual exclusion of government establishments — so public hospitals are counted in the employment, establishment, and payroll figures.[5] The Economic Census receipts and concentration figures, however, largely exclude government-owned hospitals. That means public academic cancer centers (e.g., MD Anderson) and public children's hospitals sit outside the ~$58 billion receipts and the firm/concentration counts, even though their workers show up in CBP.
3. Specialty care inside general hospitals is counted elsewhere. A cancer center, rehab unit, or NICU run as a department of a general acute-care hospital is classified under 622110, not here. This code captures only freestanding, single-focus hospitals.

Treat the ~$58 billion as "receipts of freestanding, mostly for-profit specialty hospitals reporting to the Economic Census" — a sliver of the >$1 trillion U.S. hospital sector by design, not a measure of how much specialty care Americans actually receive.

4. The investable universe

The public pure-play field is thin — and it just got thinner. Select Medical, historically one of two large listed operators, was taken private on July 1, 2026 at $16.50 per share (about $3.9 billion) by a consortium led by its own executives (Robert Ortenzio, Martin Jackson) and private-equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe; its stock was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.[8] That leaves Encompass Health as the dominant listed pure-play.

Two names investors often miscount as pure-plays: Universal Health Services (UHS) and Acadia Healthcare are largely psychiatric/behavioral operators (NAICS 622210), which is a different code — not clean 622310 comparables.[1] Surgery Partners (SGRY) is mostly ambulatory surgery, generally outside inpatient specialty hospitals.

Major private, nonprofit, and sponsor-backed owners (not investable as listed equities):

• ScionHealth (Apollo-affiliated; formed from LifePoint and Kindred assets) — a large long-term-acute-care and specialty platform under brands including Kindred; financially stressed and restructuring debt, with sale-leaseback exposure.[13][14][15]
• PAM Health (70+ rehab/LTAC hospitals), Ernest Health, and Vibra Healthcare — private-equity-backed rehab/critical-care platforms.[16][17][18]
• Children's hospitals — Boston Children's, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Cincinnati Children's, Texas Children's, and the Shriners Children's network (all nonprofit); roughly 200+ hospitals identify as children's hospitals nationally.[9][19]
• Cancer hospitals — CMS (the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) recognizes 11 "PPS-exempt" cancer hospitals (including MD Anderson, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Dana-Farber, City of Hope, Roswell Park, Fox Chase) — large, research-driven, and almost all nonprofit or public.[9]

Private ownership is hard to analyze cleanly: operators often use nonconsolidated joint ventures, leased facilities, management agreements, and separate real-estate entities. The honest summary for most investors: one large public equity (Encompass), a few diversified operators, an asset manager and a REIT with partial exposure, and a large private/nonprofit remainder reachable only through private markets or tax-exempt bonds.

5. How the money works

Specialty-hospital economics are case-rate and reimbursement-driven, not price-driven. Owners earn the spread between what a government program or insurer pays per patient and what the stay costs to deliver.

Revenue is essentially discharges × payment per case, set largely by Medicare's prospective payment systems (PPS — fixed, predetermined payments):

• IRFs are paid a bundled amount per discharge under the IRF PPS, using patient assessments and case-mix groups.[20][21]
• LTCHs are paid per discharge under the LTCH PPS, but with a two-tier system (see Section 7). Medicare classifies a hospital as an LTCH only if its average inpatient length of stay exceeds 25 days.[22]
• Cancer and children's hospitals rely far more on Medicaid, commercial insurance, research grants, and philanthropy, because their patients are mostly not Medicare-age.

The model has real operating leverage: once a hospital is built and staffed, incremental volume drops toward the margin line, but under-filled beds leave fixed costs largely intact.

The operating metrics owners and analysts actually watch:

• licensed and staffed beds, occupancy, and patient days;
• admissions / discharges and average length of stay (LTACs run weeks; IRFs run ~2 weeks) — discharging patients well and on time protects the case-rate margin;
• referral conversion and referral concentration — the pipeline from acute-care hospitals;
• payer mix and net revenue per discharge — the split among Medicare fee-for-service, Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, and commercial; the single biggest swing factor on rate;
• case-mix index (clinical acuity), denial rates, and cash collections;
• labor cost per patient day, including the volatile contract/agency-nursing line;
• capital spending per bed, and debt / lease-adjusted leverage.

Margins diverge sharply by ownership. Medicare's advisers (MedPAC, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission) have found freestanding, for-profit rehab hospitals earning aggregate Medicare margins above 20%, while hospital-based and nonprofit IRFs run near breakeven.[20] Nonprofit children's and cancer hospitals typically operate near breakeven on patient care and lean on philanthropy, endowment income, NIH (National Institutes of Health) research funding, and the 340B drug-discount program to fund their missions. Government payers dominate: Select Medical reported Medicare at 32% of its critical-illness-recovery (LTAC) revenue in 2025.[7]

Two financing features shape the for-profit side:

• Growth is "de novo" and joint-venture. Operators add capacity by building new hospitals (Encompass added eight hospitals and 517 rehab beds in 2025) and by partnering with local health systems.[6]
• Real estate is often leased, not owned. Many operators sold their buildings to healthcare REITs and lease them back, converting property into a fixed rent obligation — capital-efficient, but financially fragile when volumes dip. That fragility is a recurring theme in recent LTAC distress.[15]

6. What drives demand

Demand here is largely derived — specialty hospitals sit downstream of general hospitals and receive patients discharged from ICUs and surgical floors. Encompass reported that 92% of its patients were admitted from acute-care hospitals in 2025; Select Medical's admissions are similar.[6][7]

• Aging population. More strokes, joint replacements, cardiac and pulmonary failure, and long ICU stays feed rehab and LTAC volume. This is the core structural tailwind.
• Higher survival after serious illness. More patients living through trauma, severe infection, cancer, and complex surgery need rehabilitation and complex recovery.
• Acute-hospital discharge volume and capacity pressure. When general hospitals admit and operate more — and want stable patients out of expensive beds — post-acute referrals rise.
• Reimbursement policy. Because Medicare is the dominant payer for rehab and LTAC, CMS payment updates and coverage rules move volumes and revenue directly.
• Medicare Advantage growth (a headwind). As more seniors choose private Medicare Advantage plans, those plans use prior authorization and steer patients to cheaper settings and shorter stays — pressure on high-cost LTAC/IRF care.
• Site-of-care migration (a headwind). Home health, skilled nursing, and outpatient therapy compete for the same patients at lower cost; specialty hospitals win only where their clinical intensity is genuinely necessary.
• Disease prevalence, research, and philanthropy drive the children's and cancer segment — tied to NIH funding, cancer incidence, and donor generosity more than to Medicare rates.

7. Regulation

This is one of the most tightly regulated corners of health care, and the rules are the business model. Diligence should be done facility by facility, not assumed from a parent company's national description.

• Medicare Conditions of Participation. Hospitals billing Medicare must meet CMS standards for staffing, patient rights, quality, records, emergency services, and physical plant.[23]
• Medicare prospective payment systems. IRF and LTCH payment is reset every year through CMS rulemaking (effective October 1). Rate updates, wage-index changes, coding, quality reporting, and outlier policy directly set industry revenue.[20][21][22]
• The IRF "60% Rule." To be paid as a rehab hospital, at least 60% of a facility's patients must have one of 13 qualifying conditions (stroke, spinal-cord/brain injury, certain joint replacements, etc.). Miss it and the facility loses rehab payment status.[21]
• LTCH criteria and site-neutral payment. Since the 2013 Bipartisan Budget Act, LTCHs get the full "standard" LTCH rate only for patients who meet clinical criteria (typically a prior ICU stay or ventilator use); everyone else is paid a much lower "site-neutral" rate benchmarked to general-hospital payment. This reform shrank the industry — the number of LTCHs has fallen since it took effect.[22]
• Medical-necessity audits. Recovery-audit and payer denials of "not medically necessary" stays are a persistent revenue risk, especially in LTAC.
• EMTALA. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act requires Medicare-participating hospitals with emergency departments to screen and stabilize emergency patients regardless of ability to pay.[24]
• Physician-owned-hospital freeze (ACA Section 6001). The 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) effectively banned new physician-owned hospitals from Medicare and froze existing ones from expanding beyond their March 23, 2010 capacity — aimed at physician-owned cardiac, orthopedic, and surgical specialty hospitals. Legislation to loosen it (the Patient Access to Higher Quality Health Care Act) is pending; passage would reopen new specialty-hospital formation.[23]
• Certificate of Need (CON). As of January 2025, 35 states and Washington, D.C., ran CON programs requiring state approval before building or expanding a hospital, adding beds, or launching services — coverage varies widely.[25]
• Antitrust. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) review hospital mergers, roll-ups, and joint ventures; the FTC argues local consolidation can raise prices and depress wages.[26]
• 340B and NIH funding are economic lifelines for nonprofit children's and cancer hospitals — and both are politically contested.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

• A few for-profit chains dominate each for-profit segment. Encompass Health leads freestanding rehab; Select Medical and Apollo-affiliated ScionHealth are among the largest LTAC operators.[6][7][14] Children's and cancer care, by contrast, is a fragmented field of independent nonprofit and academic institutions.
• National concentration looks low, but that is misleading. Competition is local — a metro area may have only one rehab or LTAC operator — so national figures understate real market power.

The published national HHI (a standard concentration measure, in which anything under 1,500 is "unconcentrated") is just ~335, and the top four firms hold only ~28.6% of receipts — but that reflects a nationally fragmented count of local markets, several of which are effectively single-operator.

• Chains run many hospitals per firm. The 280 firms (Economic Census 2022, which excludes government hospitals) sit well below the 995 establishments (CBP 2023, which includes them) — consistent with multi-hospital operators like Encompass, Select, and ScionHealth each running dozens of sites over a long tail of single-site nonprofits. (The two counts come from different surveys and years, so read the ratio as directional.)[2][3]
• Hospital-within-a-hospital is common in LTAC. Select Medical ran most of its critical-illness-recovery hospitals inside or alongside host hospitals in 2025 — cheaper to build and referral-rich, but dependent on the host.[7]
• Private equity is deeply embedded, and the trend is away from public listing. Apollo-affiliated funds stand behind ScionHealth and LifePoint; Welsh, Carson took Select Medical private in 2026; PAM, Ernest, and Vibra are PE-owned.[8][12][13][15] Scale can improve purchasing, recruiting, payer negotiations, and compliance — the fragmented data support further consolidation — but antitrust scrutiny and CON rules are the counterweights.[26]

9. Risks

• Reimbursement risk dominates. Any CMS rate cut, wage-index change, tightened eligibility, or expansion of site-neutral payment hits revenue directly. LTAC has already been reshaped once by site-neutral policy.[22]
• Medicare Advantage penetration — lower negotiated rates, prior-authorization denials, and pressure for shorter stays erode volume and margin.
• Regulatory compliance — failing the IRF 60% Rule, LTCH criteria, or medical-necessity audits can cut off payment; CON and physician-ownership rules can block expansion.
• Labor cost and shortages — nurse and therapist scarcity, agency staffing, and union activity drive up the industry's largest expense line.
• Referral and payer-mix concentration — a hospital dependent on one health system or a few physicians has weak bargaining power; a shift toward government, uninsured, or lower-acuity patients cuts collections without cutting fixed costs.
• Leverage and lease burden — sale-leaseback rent and heavy debt make operators fragile when census dips; ScionHealth's debt restructuring is a live example.[15]
• Volume leakage to cheaper settings — home health, skilled nursing, and outpatient therapy competing for the same patients.
• Private-company opacity — nonconsolidated joint ventures, leases, and related-party real estate can obscure true leverage.
• Nonprofit-specific risks — dependence on philanthropy, endowment returns, NIH grants, and the politically contested 340B program leaves children's and cancer hospitals exposed to funding and policy shifts.

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public-market routes:

• Encompass Health (NYSE: EHC) is the one large listed pure-play — the biggest freestanding rehab operator, ~$5.9 billion in 2025 revenue, growing bed capacity, ~$10 billion market value, and a small dividend (about $0.19 per quarter, yield under 1%).[6][27] The cleanest way to own the demographic tailwind directly.
• Select Medical is no longer an option — it went private in July 2026.[8]
• Diversified exposure via Tenet Healthcare (THC) and HCA Healthcare (HCA), each of which owns some specialty/surgical/rehab facilities inside a larger general-hospital business (neither breaks out a 622310 line).[10][11]
• Sponsor exposure via Apollo Global Management (APO) — an indirect, diluted bet through its private healthcare platforms.[12][13]
• REIT route via Medical Properties Trust (MPW) and other healthcare REITs that own specialty-hospital real estate — a bet on the rent, carrying tenant-credit risk.[15]

Private-market routes: direct equity in operators; joint ventures with acute-care hospitals or physician groups; facility-level real estate; private credit secured by receivables or property; turnaround acquisitions of underperforming facilities; and, for the nonprofit core, tax-exempt municipal / hospital-revenue bonds — where the exposure is to the health system's credit, the practical fixed-income way into children's and cancer hospitals.[15]

A diligence checklist for any operator: facility occupancy, payer contracts, referral concentration, IRF/LTCH eligibility status, quality performance, labor turnover, denied claims, CON status, capital needs, lease obligations, debt maturities, and the share of earnings from nonconsolidated joint ventures. Use enterprise-value-to-EBITDA (EV/EBITDA — a valuation multiple comparing total company value to operating cash earnings) only after normalizing lease expense, joint-venture economics, and reimbursement timing, and separate inpatient-hospital earnings from outpatient clinics, home health, real estate, and corporate overhead.

Outlook (judgment, not a forecast). The demand backdrop is durable: an aging population and higher survival after serious illness should keep post-acute referral volume growing for years, and the leading rehab operator continues to add capacity. The offsetting force is reimbursement — Medicare Advantage growth and any further site-neutral expansion are structural pressures on rates and length of stay, which is why margins, not volumes, are the thing to watch. Two wildcards could reshape the field: loosening the ACA's physician-owned-hospital freeze would unlock new specialty-hospital formation, while cuts to 340B or NIH funding would pressure the nonprofit children's and cancer segment. On balance, this is a demand-durable but policy-capped industry — steady underlying need, with the ceiling set in Washington rather than in the market. There is no single official growth forecast for NAICS 622310 in the federal data, so underwrite individual operators and facilities rather than a headline industry rate.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, NAICS 2022 — 622310 Specialty (except Psychiatric and Substance Abuse) Hospitals (industry definition and exclusions), 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=622310&input=622310&year=2022
2. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns (CBP), NAICS 622310 — establishments, employment, annual payroll, first-quarter payroll, 2023. https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2023/econ/cbp/2023-cbp.html
3. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census — Comparative Statistics / Concentration, NAICS 622310 (receipts, firms, CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50, HHI), 2022. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2022/econ/economic-census/naics-sector-62.html
4. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Size Standards, NAICS 622310 ($47 million), 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
5. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns — Methodology (coverage; hospitals as an exception to the government-establishment exclusion), 2026. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/technical-documentation/methodology.html
6. Encompass Health Corp., 2025 Form 10-K / Fourth-Quarter 2025 Results (173 rehab hospitals; ~$5.9B revenue; 8 hospitals and 517 beds added; 92% of patients admitted from acute-care hospitals), 2026. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000785161&type=10-K
7. Select Medical Holdings Corp., 2025 Form 10-K / Fourth-Quarter 2025 Results (104 critical-illness-recovery/LTAC hospitals, 38 rehab hospitals; Medicare 32% of critical-illness-recovery revenue), 2026. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001320414&type=10-K
8. Select Medical Holdings Corp., Acquired by Consortium Led by Robert A. Ortenzio, Martin F. Jackson, and WCAS ($16.50/share; ~$3.9B; NYSE delisting effective July 1, 2026), PR Newswire, 2026. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/select-medical-holdings-corporation-acquired-by-consortium-led-by-robert-a-ortenzio-martin-f-jackson-and-wcas-302814693.html
9. CMS, PPS-Exempt Cancer Hospitals (PCHs) (list of 11 designated hospitals; MD Anderson, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Dana-Farber, City of Hope, Roswell Park, Fox Chase, etc.), 2025. https://www.cms.gov/medicare/payment/prospective-payment-systems/acute-inpatient-pps/pps-exempt-cancer-hospitals-pchs
10. HCA Healthcare, 2025 Form 10-K (includes specialty and rehabilitation hospitals; no separate 622310 disclosure), 2026. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000860730&type=10-K
11. Tenet Healthcare, 2025 Form 10-K (~50 acute-care and specialty hospitals; USPI ambulatory-surgery network), 2026. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000070318&type=10-K
12. Apollo Global Management, Portfolio / Responsible Investment disclosures (private-capital exposure to LifePoint Health and ScionHealth), 2026. https://www.apollo.com/
13. LifePoint Health / Kindred Healthcare, LifePoint Health and Kindred to Launch New Company ScionHealth, 2021. https://www.lifepointhealth.net/news/2021/10/26/lifepoint-health-and-kindred-healthcare-to-launch-new-company-scionhealth
14. ScionHealth, About Us / Specialty (long-term acute care) hospitals — brands and footprint, 2026. https://www.scionhealth.com/about-us
15. Private Equity Stakeholder Project, Apollo-owned ScionHealth: LTCH operations, debt distress, and sale-leasebacks, 2025. https://pestakeholder.org/news/apollo-owned-scionhealth-quietly-sells-and-leases-back-5-hospitals-from-reit/
16. PAM Health, About Us (70+ inpatient rehabilitation and long-term acute-care hospitals), 2026. https://pamhealth.com/company/about-us
17. Ernest Health, About Us (rehabilitation and long-term acute-care hospitals), 2026. https://ernesthealth.com/about-us/
18. Vibra Healthcare, About Vibra Healthcare (critical-care and inpatient medical-rehabilitation hospitals), 2026. https://vibrahealthcare.com/about-vibra-healthcare/
19. Shriners Children's, About, and U.S. News / Becker's Hospital Review, children's-hospital counts and cancer-hospital rankings, 2025–2026. https://www.shrinerschildrens.org/en/about
20. MedPAC, Inpatient Rehabilitation Facilities Payment System (IRF PPS basics; ~1,206 IRFs; margin differences by ownership, for-profit freestanding >20%), 2024–2025. https://www.medpac.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/MedPAC_Payment_Basics_25_IRF_FINAL_SEC.pdf
21. CMS, Inpatient Rehabilitation Facility PPS and the 60% Rule (42 CFR 412.29), 2025. https://www.cms.gov/medicare/payment/prospective-payment-systems/inpatient-rehabilitation
22. MedPAC, Long-Term Care Hospitals Payment System (>25-day average length-of-stay classification; 2013 Bipartisan Budget Act site-neutral payment; declining LTCH count), 2024–2025. https://www.medpac.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/MedPAC_Payment_Basics_25_LTCH_FINAL_SEC.pdf
23. American Medical Association / CMS, Physician-owned hospitals — ACA Section 6001 freeze (March 23, 2010 baseline) and pending Patient Access to Higher Quality Health Care Act, 2025. https://www.cms.gov/medicare/regulations-guidance/physician-self-referral/physician-owned-hospitals
24. CMS, Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), 2026. https://www.cms.gov/medicare/regulations-guidance/legislation/emergency-medical-treatment-labor-act
25. National Conference of State Legislatures, Certificate of Need State Laws (35 states and Washington, D.C., as of January 2025), 2025. https://www.ncsl.org/health/certificate-of-need-state-laws
26. Federal Trade Commission, Health Care Competition, 2026. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforcement/health-care-competition
27. StockAnalysis / Companies Market Cap, Encompass Health (EHC) market cap and dividend, 2026. https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/ehc/market-cap/