I was fortunate enough to be part of the Bearing Drift interview with Delegate Chris Peace (posted yesterday), in which he discussed New Kent County’s efforts to get an Emergency Room facility with MRI and CT capability. Take the time to listen; it has to be heard to be believed.
In effect, New Kent was hoping to get a facility so its residents would’t have to take I-295 and I-64 over to Powhatan or Chesterfield, and HCA was hoping to take advantage of an under-served market. In stepped the “invisible foot” of government regulation – in this case, the Commonwealth’s Certificate of Public Need regulations.
Of course, I’ve been complaining about COPN for some time already (and Norm Leahy was on this before I was). For all the talk of Medicaid expansion, the Patently Deficient and Unaffordably Careless Act, etc., the policy arguments have all focused on the demand for health care: how to constrain in the face of reducing the uninsured (which, by itself, would increase demand). Precious little time has been spent discussing the issue of health care supply. Thus, the predictable becomes the inevitable: higher demand means higher health care prices, which insurers pass on to the insured in higher insurance rates and higher deductibles across the country (Washington Free Beacon).
That said, microeconomic theory – even stuff as basic as what’s stated above – can slip past some folks (such as the editors of the Virginian-Pilot). New Kent’s tale (as explained by Delegate Peace), makes it more clear. The bureaucrats in Richmond told New Kent, “We need any more facilities with MRI or CT scans in the Richmond region…you don’t need a convenient, high-quality care service in your district, you can drive to Powhatan.”
Of course, that was Peace’s verbiage – no paper-pusher would be that blunt – but the effect is well-described.
Upon hearing the Delegate’s discussion (and New Kent’s successful attempt to overturn the initial ruling), it struck me just what Richmond is doing with our health care via COPN: Rationing. Under COPN, Richmond deigns to tell us how many ERs we will have, how many MRI facilities, how many CT facilities, etc. When one controls the number of facilities providing a product or service, one controls the amount of product or service provided.
When most Americans – and especially most conservatives – hear of government deciding how much health care the people should receive, they balk at the idea. Canada’s “single-payer” (its actually each province that runs its own system) politically driven health care system is infamous for rationing – “Canada” became a one-word argument against “Hillarycare” in the early 1990s. In this Administration, Democrats barely got around to discussing rationing before their political opponents raised the same, justifiable fears. Yesterday’s “Canada” became today’s “death panels.”
Yet Richmond – and every other capital in a COPN-regime state – has been rationing health care for years, all in the misguided name of “reducing cost” while actually raising prices (the effect of restrained supply, see above), while blocking market access for competitors and protecting the profits of incumbent providers. COPN is corporatism at its worst.
This is why Virginians across the political spectrum, and especially those in the center and on the right side of it, should support the efforts of Delegates Chris Peace, John O’Bannon, and Kathy Byron to scale back COPN’s grips on the health care market and allow competition to increase health care supply. It means more health care for Virginians (including roughly 10,000 more hospital beds, according to an analysis by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University), lower prices, and lower insurance rates.
It’s time to end health care rationing in Virginia. What is a bad idea in Washington is still a bad idea in Richmond.
