This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Monday, April 6, 2020. I'm Caleb Brown.

Dozens of states have laws on the books that allow some businesses to effectively veto a competing enterprise from

getting started or expanding. It's called certificate of need. During this

pandemic, almost half of states that have these laws on the books have either suspended them or relaxed

requirements to allow health care capacity to expand.

Still other states have not only done nothing, they've actually made it harder to bring new health care

capacity online.

Angela Ericsson directs strategic research at the Pacific Legal Foundation.

We spoke yesterday. So during a pandemic, what we want to have happen is health care capacity be flexible enough to expand as rapidly as it needs to.

And there are laws in place in some states that make it impossible to even do that because they have to go through a bureaucratic process that often takes months or years in order to get up and running.

Okay, so this is broadly speaking,

certificate of need laws, and of course,

libertarians are hammering over this issue quite a bit, you included.

So what do certificate of need laws, at least generally speaking,

because these are state-based laws, what, generally speaking, do they require in order to expand some capacity in an industry?

Yeah, so in health care, there are about 36 states that have these laws in place.

And in order to, if you're a health care provider, or would be health care provider, in order to start operating or expand in some way or to bring in new

equipment you have to go through a certificate of need process which requires an application

you'll have to go to a hearing.

At the hearing, this is sort of the big piece.

The hearing, you'll have to prove that your services or additional beds or

additional equipment are needed.

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