Gov. Terry Branstad Pushed Certificate of Need Reform; Iowa Hospitals Killed It
State Rep says hospitals are "holding entrepreneurial physicians and clinics hostage" with CON laws. That's exactly right.
Iowa hospitals successfully killed a proposal that would have allowed more competition in the state's health care markets.
A bill, pushed by Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, that would have reformed the state's Certificate of Need laws failed to clear a committee vote on Wednesday after a concentrated lobbying effort from large hospitals, according to Iowa Public Radio. The bill would not have repealed the state's CON law entirely, but would have exempted several medical services—including surgical centers and medical imaging clinics—from the CON process.
Certificate of Need laws—also known as Certificate of Necessity or Certificate of Public Need laws in other states—give state governments broad authority to regulate health care facilities, supposedly in order to balance the interests of providers and patients. Often, they are fraught with politics and allow providers to effectively veto unwanted competition, leaving patients with fewer choices, less access to care, and forced to pay higher prices.
In Iowa, the CON law has "become a way for certain (organizations) to keep out competition," Branstad told the Quad City Times last year. In other public comments, Branstad has stressed how the CON law hurts Iowans by limiting access to health care and hurts the state's economy by making it harder to attract new medical services.
But Branstad's support wasn't enough to get the bill through the state legislature against the wishes of the state's hospital lobby.
"You're holding the entrepreneurial physicians and clinics hostage in not being able to expand their clinics," state Rep. Rob Taylor (R-West Des Moines), told hospital executives who attended the committee meeting and urged the bill's defeat, Iowa Public Radio reported.
That's exactly right. To understand how that happens, take a look at the story of Dr. Lee Birchansky, an Iowa eye surgeon has spent more than decade trying to navigate the process. Birchansky was profiled in 2016 by Erin Jordan, a reporter at The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, as part of an investigation of Iowa's CON laws:
Ceiling-mounted microscopes, sterilizers and phacoemulsification equipment sit dormant in Dr. Lee Birchansky's operating rooms — hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted because Birchansky can't get state permission to do cataract surgery in his office at the Fox Eye Laser and Cosmetic Institute on H Avenue NE.
Birchansky operated in these rooms for six years, but in 2004 — after Birchansky asked for a change in ownership — UnityPoint Health-St. Luke's Hospital pulled out of the deal. When he tried to get his own certificate for outpatient surgeries, which cost less than in hospitals, the state said no — four times.
"There were three entities objecting — Surgery Center Cedar Rapids, Mercy and St. Luke's," Birchansky said. "They all had reason to make sure no competition was entering the marketplace."
It's the same story in other places. A Reason investigation published in January showed how Carilion Clinic, a major hospital in Roanoke, Virginia, had used the state's CON licensing process to stop a nearby hospital from building a neo-natal intensive care unit. Even after a premature infant died at the second hospital, the Virginia Department of Health (at the urging of Carilion's executives) refused to grant permission for a NICU.
The costs of CON laws aren't always that obvious, they always exist. In a paper published last year by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,Thomas Stratmann and Davild Wille argue that hospitals in states with CON laws have higher mortality rates than hospitals in non-CON states. The average 30-day mortality rate for patients with pneumonia, heart failure, and heart attacks in states with CON laws is between 2.5 percent and 5 percent higher even after demographic factors are taken out of the equation.
Patients lose, but hospitals (at least the ones lucky enough to already have access to the market) benefit from CON laws. That's why they continue to be on the books in more than 30 states, despite opposition from academics, the Federal Trade Commission, and governors like Branstad.
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
Bullshit – everybody knows CON laws cut out wasteful duplication of services and thereby make healthcare delivery more efficient. Nobody needs 23 different kinds of healthcare. This efficiency created by monopoly delivery of services is why the Soviet Union was so successful at making cheap bread so delicious that people would stand in line for hours just to get some. We should emulate that model instead of this free market crap where you’ve got such a wide variety of choices that you get confused over who has the best product at the best price. You should have one shoe store that sells one kind of shoe, one car dealer that sells one kind of car, one beer brewer that makes one kind of beer, one mail deliverer that delivers all the mail – that’s efficiency.
IF GOVERNOR BASTARDN WAS A DEMOCRAT THAT FACT WOULD BE PLASTERED ALL OVER THIS ARTICLE.
What could be more healthy for people than regulatory capture?
It’s really sick that an animal hospital has easier access to equipment than a human one.