This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 15, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

One of the biggest claims made by supporters of health care certificate of need laws is that

competition in health care can actually deny access to those who need in rural areas.

James Bailey is a professor of economics at Providence College.

He's looked into that claim and found it wanting.

We spoke this week about con laws and their predictable results.

His certificate of need is in many states a hindrance to offering new services and in my home state of Kentucky one of those services is if you and your

buddies want to buy a moving van or moving truck and start helping people move from one place to another, boy, you need the state's permission to do that and the state will then in many industries will ask the existing

members of that industry would you like this guy to enter into this business

that you are currently in and they almost uniformly will say, you know, we don't

think that our state needs more either moving trucks or medical facilities. So no, no, I think we're fine. I think the state is good and you can

go ahead and tell them that no they should they may not open their business and people

don't really believe that that's exactly how certificate of need works,

but of course that is how it works.

And those incumbent industries,

or those incumbent businesses within those

industries will have defenders. Some of those defenders are

lobbyists and I have spoken with some of these lobbyists who say regularly, well the issue here is that if you tell anybody that they can

open this kind of clinic or have an MRI machine or any number of other things that a medical service might provide, then there won't be anything in the rural areas.

There won't be anything to serve remote populations.

To what extent has there been research on this and what have researchers found?

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