The suit by the Georgia Alliance of Community Hospitals challenges a rule approved Dec. 13 by the State Board of Community Health that reclassifies general surgeons from "multi-specialty" status to a "single-specialty" classification.
The rule change is designed to allow general surgeons to set up ambulatory surgery centers without going through Georgia's certificate-of-need process, the 59-hospital alliance said in the Superior Court suit filed in Dougherty County.
According to the general surgeons, the centers could provide surgical procedures now available only through hospitals, just as specialists such as plastic surgeons or orthopedists can provide to their patients.
But alliance president Monty Veazey said the new rule "flies in the face of multiple court decisions and is a naked and illegal attempt to override the will of the General Assembly of Georgia."
The Alliance said that under rules of the Department of Community Health, multi-specialty practices have to have a certificate of need from the agency and commit to providing a minimum level of indigent care to establish an ambulatory surgery center.
The lawsuit, filed against the department and Albany Surgical, an Albany-based general surgery practice, seeks a finding that the new rule is invalid because it "is in excess of DCH's statutory authority, conflicts with statutory authority, is arbitrary and unreasonable."
In a news release, the alliance said previous court cases, all the way up to the state Supreme Court, have all concluded that the Legislature reserves the right to decide whether to reclassify general surgery as a single specialty.
During the last session of the General Assembly, the alliance noted, the House voted 112-55 to return a bill that would have reclassified general surgery to the House Rules Committee.
Kathy Browning, executive director of the Georgia Society of General Surgeons, said the bill was defeated by a last-minute lobbying effort by opponents who spread a rumor that the change would lead to a proliferation of abortion clinics in the state.
Browning said the lawsuit was "without merit" because the Department of Community Health has the authority to set the rule defining general surgery as a speciality.
She said that also was the position of the hospital alliance in the previous litigation that it cited.
"The alliance argued that the General Assembly had left it up to the department to make the rules," Browning said. "That was their position: Rules were rules and they were not statutes."
Dr. Price Corr of Albany Surgical said Georgia has been the only state not to classify general surgery as a specialty. Corr said the state is losing general surgeons as a result, and that trauma care in Georgia has suffered.
"The Alliance of Community Hospitals does not want competition," Corr said.
He denied the contention that the general surgeons sought to avoid Medicare and Medicaid patients through ambulatory surgery centers that he said could provide services "at half or a third of the cost" of the hospitals.
"We would lower the cost of health care," Corr said.
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