This is the Cater Daily podcast for Wednesday, December 11th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

State lawmakers ought to take a look at the data surrounding Certificate of Need Laws and the pandemic.

Researcher Jamie Kavanaugh, the Pacific Legal Foundation, has looked at how states responded to the pandemic.

Found that states with competitors veto laws in place had some of the worst outcomes.

We're now four years from, four and a half years, really, from the start of the pandemic,

which gave a lot of states' opportunities to rethink a lot of health care regulation,

especially needless health care regulation.

Do we have any bits of data that have come back from 2020 and 2021 or 2022 to tell us the disparate impact of the pandemic in states that did or did not have

these severe incumbent protecting restrictions known as certificates of need?

That's a great question.

Yeah, there are a couple studies. One showed that in states

with certificate of need laws, hospitals were 27% more likely to run out of beds during the pandemic.

And this is with waivers in place where most states with certificate of need laws, the governor

signed emergency orders exempting the hospitals from

the con programs during the pandemic. So they could add beds. But, you know, I think the overall

problem is just that they've been restricting the supply of hospital beds for so many decades

that they couldn't just, you know, put a thousand beds online overnight. I was wondering

if part of it was just,

well, we've never worked out that muscle before, like, which is, you know, expanding or contracting

as you, the organization sees fit rather than going through this process of seeking permission.

That's a great point. Probably the facilities in those states weren't even equipped to know

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