This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 3rd,

2003.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In states where certificate of need laws govern

the creation of birthing centers, just how is need being defined.

Anastasia Bowden, the new director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies

and herself an expectant mother describes how birthing centers work and

why the desires for patients ought to trump a bureaucratic definition of need.

Most people and good for them quite frankly are unaware that at the state level if you want to

improve a medical facility if you want to expand a medical facility if you want to

create a new medical facility, you, the business often has to ask permission

from the government and that often means asking effectively the permission of people already operating in medicine in the state.

So very briefly, just we've talked about it many times on this program but detail that process.

Sure in over half of states if you want to add a hospital bed or buy some

medical equipment or maybe start a new medical facility, you have to prove that you're needed first.

You have to prove to a selection of bureaucrats, to their satisfaction that another competitor is needed, but in practice the bureaucrats

defer to the wishes of the existing businesses and so those of us who are familiar

with these laws, Certificate of Need laws,

tend to call them competitors veto laws, because in reality the incumbents

control who is let in to the market. And in the particular case of what are known as birthing centers, these are facilities

that are aimed directly at women about to give birth.

Coincidentally, you are about to give birth.

...