This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 7th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The American Way of Healthcare Regulation gave us some of the most costly missteps in response to this

pandemic. Cato Institute Senior Fellow Jeff Singer and his new essay for Cato's

Pandemics and Policy Series details some of the regulations that should be scrapped now to respond to

the pandemic and should stay gone for the sake of innovation going forward.

If we take the existing regulatory structure with respect to health care.

What regulations, what pieces of that structure gave us some of the most costly mistakes in responding to this pandemic.

Well, of course, there's a lot of FDA regulatory structure that delayed getting testing out to the public because for all

intents and purposes the FDA granted a monopoly to the CDC to develop a test and basically sent the message to any of the private sector labs that the CDC is on this and then of course the CDC had a faulty test and that

basically lost a month in getting testing out there and then hurriedly the FDA

started relaxing requirements to allow tests to get out there so that we could play catch-up and by by late March states and private sector labs were starting to

get tests out independent of the CDC that was one big one but another major one that remains an obstacle to moving health care

practitioners around to the country to places where they're needed are state-based, which are state-based licensing laws.

This was, we learned this lesson very acutely with this pandemic and because of health care licensing laws health care

practitioners are not allowed to practice in a state in which they're not

licensed so many governors suspended their licensing laws at least for the duration of the pandemic to allow doctors, nurses, other health care practitioners who are licensed in other states to come into their state and help

take care of the overload of patients that were flooding their hospitals and emergency rooms.

And they also relaxed a lot of scope of practice laws to allow health care practitioners, for example, who have who are actually trained to do

to allow them to practice to the full extent to their training

to help get more health care out to people.

Also, state-based licensing laws have

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