Final North Carolina CON Opportunities for New MRI and PET Scanners and Operating Rooms | Williams Mullen jdsupra.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from jdsupra.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Carolina Journal reports:
A coal miners’ son. A powerful attorney. A defeated surgeon. Two college sweethearts.
All of them became caught up in a powerful system known as Certificate of Need. Certificate of Need laws give the state control of medical resources. Twenty-five people, an advisory board appointed by the governor, oversee the supply of hospital beds, medical equipment, and a host of other resources.
In theory, the system is supposed to guard patients’ access to health care.
But the system offers a wealth of opportunities to crush unwanted competition and hamstring smaller doctors’ practices. Under CON laws, incumbent providers can take their competitors to court and force them to bleed money for months, years, or even decades.
effects of
Certificate of Need laws:
1970s: Health insurers have a dilemma, and Uncle Sam is about to get involved. At the time, insurers pay hospitals for their costs. Hospitals go on buying sprees, and everyone else foots the bill.
1971: North Carolina decides hospitals have a spending problem, and they need a budget. Lawmakers require providers to get state permission before making any big purchases and Certificate of Need laws are born.
1973: Not so fast. The N.C. Supreme Court axes the first version of CON laws for “establishing a monopoly.”
1974: Congress picks up the idea, and it passes a Certificate of Need mandate. But Congress does nothing to fix the underlying incentive to waste money. Instead, Congress pushes states into adopting regulations known as CON laws.
speak on the record.
“It’s human nature, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but I have clients who think it’s unconstitutional, it’s terrible, it’s an unfair restraint on trade,” said a CON attorney. “But once they get it, CON is great, it’s saving money, it’s good for the people. It’s incredible the metamorphosis they undergo.”
THE FIGHTER
Dr. Jay Singleton sometimes says he’s not the right man for the job.
Singleton is the son of coal miners. He spent his childhood crisscrossing Appalachia in a trailer, always in search of another dying non-union mine. The good old days of mining were just a memory, and, more and more, the only thing left was strip mining, tearing the tops off mountains.
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Now is the time for providers to consider filing (or re-filing) a Petition as North Carolina’s State Health Coordinating Council (SHCC) begins its efforts to prepare the document that will define opportunities to develop Certificate of Need (CON)-regulated health care facilities and services in North Carolina in 2022. The Petition process allows interested parties to affect the content of the State Medical Facilities Plan (SMFP) by seeking changes in either the policies and methodologies employed by the SHCC or in the need determinations for various health care projects.