The Briefing Room
General Category => Health/Education => Topic started by: PeteS in CA on August 26, 2021, 01:12:22 am
-
Alabama's Dumb Health Care Regulations Helped Create a Shortage of ICU Beds
https://reason.com/2021/08/24/alabamas-dumb-health-care-regulations-helped-create-a-shortage-of-icu-beds/ (https://reason.com/2021/08/24/alabamas-dumb-health-care-regulations-helped-create-a-shortage-of-icu-beds/)
With COVID infections serious enough to require hospitalization surging, Alabama's Department of Health delivered grim news last week: There are no more available beds in the state's intensive care units (ICUs).
An insufficient supply of ICU beds is one of the acute crisis points of the pandemic. When hospitals run out of room to treat patients who need the most help, doctors and hospital administrators must make difficult triage decisions. This affects not just COVID patients but anyone else who might be in urgent need of medical care—car crash victims or those who've had heart attacks—and it almost certainly means that some people will die who otherwise may have survived.
It's a crisis that has been made worse by outdated and ineffective government regulations—known as "Certificate of Need" (CON) laws—that actually reduce the number of available hospital beds by requiring that hospitals get permission from the state before adding capacity.
In Alabama, which is one of 27 states that subjects the supply of hospital beds to CON oversight by the state, we're now seeing some of the consequences of these rarely thought-of policies. ...
Here is a PDF with the 35 states (plus DC) with CON laws and the facilities and equipment regulated thereby, https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/con_table_2_regulated_services.pdf .