Industry playbooks: the same machinery, applied to your business

Every page on this site up to this point applies to any LLC. This section is different on purpose: it’s where a specific industry’s own licensing rules, ownership restrictions, and federal overlay get laid on top of everything already covered, without repeating any of it.

Why this section is built as cores and niches, not one page per business type

Some industries share so much underlying regulatory machinery that writing each one separately would mean saying the same thing a dozen times. Healthcare is the clearest example: a therapy practice, a nursing home, and a dental practice all answer to corporate practice of medicine doctrine, the friendly-PC and MSO model, federal fraud and abuse law, and Medicare and Medicaid enrollment rules, even though the day-to-day business looks nothing alike. Rather than repeat that machinery a dozen times, it’s written once as a cluster core, and each specific niche states only what’s actually different about it.

Healthcare, the first core

The healthcare structuring core covers the shared machinery every healthcare niche inherits: corporate practice of medicine, the friendly-PC and MSO model, including the real 2026 tightening of that model in California and Oregon, the federal fraud and abuse statutes, Medicare and Medicaid enrollment and change-of-ownership, and the facility-versus-operations split. Read it first if you’re structuring anything in healthcare, regardless of which specific niche you’re in.

Niches inherit from that core and add only their own delta:

• ABA therapy: licensure that varies by state for board-certified behavior analysts, revenue concentrated in Medicaid and insurance mandates, and the Medicaid program-integrity compliance work that starts the day the entity is formed.
• Skilled nursing: a CHOW timeline that can freeze a deal’s closing, and successor liability that can follow a buyer even through a clean asset purchase.
• Home care and home health: medical and non-medical care are almost entirely different regulated businesses, and certificate of need laws can bar a new medical provider from entering a state at all.
• Hospice: an aggregate Medicare payment cap that can create real repayment liability from patient mix alone, with every claim entirely valid.
• Assisted living: mostly outside CMS certification entirely, which means the resident agreement, not a federal contract, carries the real compliance weight.
• Med spas: most run more revenue through a physician-owned structure than the law actually requires, and the 2026 CPOM tightening lands hardest on exactly this niche’s common ownership pattern.
• Behavioral health: a mixed-license practice can be running two separate ownership analyses at once, and telehealth’s real constraint is clinician licensure in the patient’s state.
• Dental: the DSO model this niche pioneered, and ownership rules that are frequently looser than physician CPOM, sometimes stricter.
• Substance use treatment: a federal kickback statute that reaches private-pay and commercial arrangements the ordinary rules never touch.
• Physical and occupational therapy: the real question is usually whether a referring physician’s ownership clears a specific federal self-referral exception.
• IDD group homes: growth capped by state Medicaid waiver allocation rather than demand, and a propco-opco lease that needs real documentation to survive related-party scrutiny.
• Pharmacy: ownership rules that predate general CPOM, and a wholesale distribution license that appears the moment product moves between locations.

What comes after healthcare

Non-healthcare verticals follow the identical six-slot approach: the regulatory and licensing overlay, the ownership constraint and any friendly-entity workaround, which structuring primitives from The Blueprint apply, which doctrines from State Lines bite hardest, the money-and-transfer mechanic specific to that industry, and the industry’s own traps and multi-state wrinkles. The real estate playbook covers the core plus twelve asset classes; professional services and regulated trades are planned for this section in time.

Where this section hands off

Nothing in Industry Playbooks re-teaches the actual entity mechanics. The structuring choices live in The Blueprint, the underlying liability doctrine lives in State Lines, and the operating agreement drafting lives in The Rulebook. This section’s only job is the layer specific to your industry, sitting on top of everything else this site already covers.