This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 20th, 2003.

I'm Caleb Brown. The pandemic brought with it a relaxing suspension or cancellation of regulations governing all sorts of activity.

So what reforms stuck around and what prohibitions are coming back as states of emergency

expire?

Ray Heterman is Vice president at the Buckeye Institute in Ohio.

We spoke at the Cato Institute's State Health Policy Summit

earlier this month.

As the pandemic was taking hold in March of 2020, February and March of 2020 in the United States,

it became increasingly clear that a lot of structures that states had established

regulatory structures were not serving people well.

That's a dramatic understatement, of course.

And, you know, we documented with my Cato Mrs.

You colleagues and others that a lot of these regulations, a lot of these rules were not necessary to begin with, but they were so many of them were temporarily removed or loosened during the pandemic to accommodate the medical needs, health care needs.

You could have liquor delivered, you could drive away with liquor from certain from mixed drinks from some

places and things like that but in the health care space what did we see states do?

Yeah, so if you remember the March of 2020

during the pandemic, states have a lot of authority

over who can practice medicine in their states.

They still, states regulate everything from the number of hospitals, hospital beds,

to doctors, to nurses.

And states responded very dramatically in response to the pandemic.

In fact I would probably argue in the two-year period since we've seen the biggest changes in some health care laws ever in the

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