“This was big time, David and Goliath stuff,” Dr. Dan McGee told NPR. “You see 14 of their lawyers sitting there and you see three of ours.” Between shifts in the emergency room, McGee had been sitting in an Oregon courtroom, fighting for his practice.
The practice is Eugene Emergency Physicians, a group of more than 40 doctors and physician assistants who staff several emergency departments. A national company, ApolloMD, was about to replace them. By the time NPR reported on July 3, 2026, the local group had won, and the result was drawing attention across the country.
The plan that set it off
The Lund Report, republished by OPB in March 2026, described the plan. The nonprofit PeaceHealth intended to contract out emergency services at three Oregon hospitals, Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend, Peace Harbor Medical Center and Cottage Grove Community Medical Center, to the Atlanta-based, for-profit firm. ApolloMD said an Oregon company it had set up, Lane Emergency Physicians, LLC, would actually provide the care.
Lawmakers were not persuaded. A 2025 Oregon law bars non-medical entities from owning or controlling private medical practices, including through hiring, setting work hours or deciding pay. A spokesperson for House Majority Leader Ben Bowman, who led the law, said the information so far suggested ApolloMD’s structure was typical of the model the bill was meant to prevent. Attorney Hayden Rooke-Ley said the arrangement “may have already violated the law.” Legislators asked Attorney General Dan Rayfield to put a hold on the deal. There was a catch: the final bill gave the Justice Department no enforcement powers, and a department attorney wrote that the Oregon Health Authority might be the right agency instead.
Why doctors worried
NPR explained the concern with a professor at Brown University, Erin Fuse Brown. Many states require that doctors own medical practices, so patient interests come ahead of profit. Staffing firms get around this, she said, by having a doctor technically own the local practice while that owner stays out of patient care and hands hiring, firing and other operations to the company. Hospitals like the model because such firms often promise more revenue and take over the running of an ER.
Dr. Jonas Pologe, who works for the Eugene group, feared what it meant for him. ApolloMD offered local doctors jobs, but if he pushed back on a decision, he worried his hours would shrink. “There’s certainly a chance that if you make enough of a stink, you think that something needs to change, they can just stop giving you shifts,” he said. ApolloMD’s chief executive, Dr. Yogin Patel, said the company does not interfere with how its doctors practice and is being unfairly lumped in with wider anxiety about corporate takeovers.
How it ended
The Eugene group’s lawsuit was the first test of Oregon’s law. McGee said colleagues around the state were listening in, “almost like background music on an elevator.” At key moments, he was told, nurses cheered.
Before any ruling came, the hospital system dropped its plan to use ApolloMD and struck a deal to stay with McGee’s group. “This is a big victory for independent physician groups over corporate medicine,” McGee said. The American Academy of Emergency Medicine, which backed the doctors, called Oregon’s law the strongest in the country. California and Vermont have passed similar laws, and Rhode Island and New Mexico are weighing related bills. In Virginia, an independent ER group replaced by a large staffing firm is meeting legislators to push for change. Envision Healthcare, TeamHealth and USACS declined NPR’s questions about whether Oregon’s law would change their investment plans there; only TeamHealth currently operates in the state.
Sources
- In Oregon, local doctors use new state law to fend off a national company (NPR)
- PeaceHealth emergency room deal will test new Oregon law (OPB / The Lund Report)
