Legislative opponents of certificate of need laws are confident. This may be the year they prevail against the restrictive health-care regulations. But opposition from the powerful hospital lobby remains. Hospitals claim competition would hurt their bottom line. It would place hospitals, especially rural ones, at risk…
Texas did it in 1985. California did it in 1987. Pennsylvania did it in 1996. New Hampshire did it in 2016. Florida did it in 2019. I’m talking about states that repealed their Certificate of Need laws. CON laws were implemented by almost every state as a condition to receiving…
A bipartisan group of House members hopes to break a regulatory chokehold on surgical facilities. Reps. Billy Richardson, D-Cumberland; Ed Goodwin, R-Chowan; and David Rogers, R-Rutherford, on Tuesday, April 16, filed House Bill 857. The bill abolishes certificate-of-need laws preventing standalone…
Top-ranking senators have introduced an omnibus health-care bill that would add severely disabled people to the Medicaid rolls and abolish restrictive certificate of need laws. Sens. Joyce Krawiec, R-Forsyth, and Dan Bishop, R-Mecklenburg, discussed Senate Bill 361, The Health Care Expansion Act of 2019,…
If Medicaid expansion forces taxpayers to pick up the tab for a service that was either previously paid for some other way or not consumed in the first place, there is no reduction in the cost of care.
The state treasurer and the N.C. Healthcare Association can’t reach consensus over how to pay for health insurance for state employees. The governor and some legislative leaders are advocating Medicaid expansion to cover an additional 600,000 people, which would cost the state roughly $600 million the first two years. The…
ALBEMARLE — An eager crowd of bundled-up observers assembled early Jan. 17 in a vacant lot, huddling with government officials as steam from their coffee cups curled into the air. They attended a groundbreaking ceremony at Pfeiffer University for a $16 million Center for Health…
Dr. Gajendra Singh wants to help patients get an MRI scan for a fraction of the price hospitals and big health care networks charge. But state regulators and powerful lobbying allies restrain him. On Monday, July 30, Singh joined with the Institute for Justice to…
In yesterday’s Daily Journal, I wrote about Certificate of Need laws. The issue moved from the theoretical to the concrete for me as I spent the past week nursing my husband through a pretty painful kidney stone and associated blockage. Every few hours, I administered more opioids. He missed…
Certificate-of-need reforms were left out of the final budget compromise passed by the General Assembly. But backers aren’t giving up on curtailing or ending the regulation that forces medical providers to get permission from the government to make major new investments. Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell, successfully inserted a phased-in…
