This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 8th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The pandemic revealed structural problems in the American health care system

and the state-level pandemic response often involved doing away

with at least temporarily. Regulations stood in the way of people accessing care.

So what were the right spots during this pandemic?

Sal Newso is Vice President of Policy at the James Madison Institute.

We spoke last week.

Libertarian has long cared about eliminating certificate of need and restrictions on scope of practice and issues relating to cross-border

provision of medical care and that was before we had a global pandemic that shut a lot of things down, including

doctors offices.

And a lot of people were left with, if they didn't have COVID, even if they had medical issues that were non-critical.

It doesn't mean it's non-essential that you get care for that, but it meant that it was a lot harder for a lot of people to get that kind of care.

So what have we seen in the wake of COVID-19, which we hope we're in the wake of COVID-19, is from state legislatures and regulators with respect to getting people the care that they need.

Well, the idea of kind of the pandemic as it played out,

shined a light on a lot of the onerous regulations that states and quite frankly the federal government

had implemented over decades with respect to the provision of health care.

So really the way that Florida tackled a lot of

these was on the supply chain of the provision of care and that began actually a couple of years before the

pandemic. Our then House Speaker made it a priority of his to relieve or to provide relief to patients as they attempted to have a relationship

with their doctors.

And that was the kind of the onus of Florida's health care agenda for 2019 and 2020.

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