Analysis: Mississippi legislator says certificate of need law outdated
It’s not unusual for competing health care facilities to get bogged down in protracted legal battles when one facility is approved for a CON and another challenges that approval.
“I just feel like we’re spending millions of millions and millions of dollars over turf wars when we could better spend it on infrastructure and patient care,” Baker said in an interview this past week.
Defenders of the CON process say it’s a safeguard against wasteful spending on health care because it requires facilities to prove that the services they want to offer would not duplicate those offered by competitors nearby. For example, if a nursing home wants to add beds or if a medical office wants to add a magnetic resonance imaging machine, each would need to file a CON application that lists details of the proposal, including the cost.
SunHerald
2/2/14
Magnolia Tribune
