How Little-Known "CON" Laws Are Bad For Your Health

Politicians often insist government is the only way to increase access to health care. In fact, the opposite is true: For years,“certificate of need” laws at the state level have prevented much-needed medical facilities from being built across the country.

CONs are the means where states prohibit competition for their “pals”.

Pals, as in DONORS. It's not that hard to fix. Simply require that ALL political donations be ANONYMOUS. You can't sell influence if you don't know who is buying. Americans should be allowed to donate to any candidate or party they choose, in any amount they wish; that's FREEDOM. But selling and purchasing an outcome is BRIBERY, a CRIME. Lock 'em up!

CON laws of course are primarily designed to protect existing market shares of medical providers. In the past I worked both sides of the fence for my employers. I can help argue for and against the licensing of a tenth MRI machine in a geographical area.

So...tell me some stuff about the “Opioid Crisis” that is rocking America. YOu know, the one where the DEA crawls down the doctors’ throats about over-prescribing narcotics because of the sudden uptick in drug overdoses? The one where most reports don’t bother to separate the legal prescription drug overdoses from the illegal ones? The heroin, fentanyl and laced heroin ODs?

Seems that the CDC has come out with guidelines about who can have what when, CVS has decided they know better than our physicians about what pain we’re in...it sounds like we don’t really need the doctors...we’ll just let the pharmacy diagnose us and give aspirin.

BTW- I’m stage IV met. breast cancer, so the limits won’t apply to me. The drug store may want a note from my mom or husband or God-all in heaven. I don’t even know anyone (since my husband died-not of a drug overdose) who would be immediately impacted. However, I am smart enough (due to past employment) to know that once the good doctors stop handing out the legal stuff, Mr. and Mrs. Middle Class will be driving to the bigger cities and buying their drugs...off the street. THEN we’ll see a real uptake in overdoses. Sorry, this has become my pet peeve...The DEA lost the war on drugs, so now they’re going to open another front, on our average Joe Blow citizens.

I spent more than a decade obtaining CON approvals for a national developer of full service retirement communities and was part of the national health planning process when CON laws were being developed in the mid 1970s. One of the earliest targets of the CON process were CT scanners. At the time CT scanners cost over $1 million and were seen by health planners as expensive hospital “toys” that had little medical need. Fortunately the CT technology became less expensive avoiding CON review thresholds and the life saving benefits were better understood. Had the CON bean counters prevailed there would only be a handful of CT scanners in the US and thousands of patients (including my wife who had a CT scan that detected a large cancer tumor on her kidney) would have died.

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