New research finds that federal regulation leads to an increase in deaths, and North Carolina is one of the states most affected. Days before President-elect Joe Biden enters office, Mercatus Center economists James Broughel and Dustin Chambers released a study arguing that the connection between regulation and mortality rates may be causal. The Democratic Biden...
Raleigh needs more affordable housing. But an $80 million housing bond on the election ballot isn’t a long-term solution. Deregulation and market-driven planning are better options, policy experts say. Affordable housing is possible when people are allowed to build, said Joe Coletti, senior fellow at the John Locke Foundation. The city introduced an $80-million housing...
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many questions with precious few answers. It’s tough to debate otherwise. A dearth of data, beyond the numbers of confirmed cases and deaths, allowing people to make reasonable decisions about their safety — and returning to some sense of normalcy — is clearly problematic. It’s just one aspect as a...
The coronavirus did what years of lawmaking and lawsuits failed to do — pushed North Carolina to temporarily waive barriers on telemedicine and the controversial certificate of need laws that restrict the supply of health care. Ambulatory surgery centers can now act as temporary hospitals. Out-of-state telemedicine providers can treat patients. Adult care homes, mental...
Legislators are looking at a controversial reform to lower patients’ medical bills for surgery in North Carolina. Would-be reformers want to introduce more competition into North Carolina’s health care system by partially freeing ambulatory surgery centers from Certificate of Need laws — an obscure regulation that controls the supply of medical care — but they...
Reforms to health-care regulations aren’t dead. Certificate of need reform was one of the bills sacrificed as scrap material for the piecemeal budget. As Republicans looked to push pieces of the budget past Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto, they stripped House Bill 126 and transformed it into a salary increase for the highway patrol. But...
A years-long push to expand competition in the health-care industry passed the Senate Health Committee Monday and soon may reach the Senate floor. Under current certificate-of-need laws, hospitals and medical providers must apply to the state planning board before they can build or expand facilities. North Carolina’s CON laws impose the nation’s fifth-toughest restrictions on...
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 of closing, they say. Charity care they must provide...
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 ambulatory surgery centers from entering the medical market unless they get permission from state...
The annual rate of economic growth from 1995 to 2014 was more than a percentage point lower than it would have been in the absence of America’s debt explosion.
In 2011, a then-new Republican majority in the N.C. General Assembly was alarmed at an expensive new trend in local government. Residents in Wilson, Salisbury, Mooresville, Davidson, and Morganton were being hit with higher taxes and even electricity and water rates as their cities were bleeding money. Why? To pay for their cities’ decision to...
