“COVID-19 has forced doctors to postpone many types of surgeries, but some things can’t wait. Ophthalmologist Jay Singleton saw one man at risk of permanent blindness on a recent Friday evening in New Bern, North Carolina.
“He had a rare type of glaucoma caused by a large cataract, and the only thing to do was to remove it so the pressure would go down inside the eye,” Singleton says. “We knew it was a very real situation because he already had lost one of his eyes to the same thing.”
Singleton had all the skills and equipment necessary for the job at his state-of-the-art vision center. Unfortunately, the government won’t let him use his space for the vast majority of the surgeries he performs.
North Carolina and many other states impose a regulatory tool called a “certificate of need” (CON), which forces health care providers to prove an unmet need in the market before operating a facility, scaling up, or purchasing major medical equipment. In practice, CON laws block new competition, funneling traffic to big hospital systems—the last thing that should happen during a global pandemic.”…
“”You have to pick a side,” Singleton says. “If you treat it like a business, you must allow other people to enter the market and compete with you like every other business. If you treat it like a public partnership, then you can’t enrich yourself on the backs of Medicare patients. You can’t have it both ways.””
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“15 states—including California, Colorado, and most recently New Hampshire—have eliminated their CON programs.
None of these states has experienced any negative effects. Indeed, Matthew Mitchell, a researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, says states that got rid of their CON laws have more hospitals and surgery centers per capita, along with more hospital beds, dialysis clinics, and hospice care facilities.
“Forty years of peer-reviewed academic research suggests that CON laws have not only failed to achieve their goals but have in many cases led to the opposite of what those who enacted the laws intended,” he says.”
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“Many states, including Connecticut, Georgia, and South Carolina, suspended their CON laws after the pandemic came to America. Other states, such as Rhode Island, rolled back CON laws at hospitals and nursing facilities but not outpatient surgery centers or hospices.
Instead of just being a temporary reprieve, these emergency actions should be expanded and made permanent.”