From The Hill (link: https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/4621690-the-misguided-laws-contributing-to-americas-rural-health-crisis/):
America’s rural health crisis has gone from bad to worse.
More than 90 percent of rural counties face a shortage of primary care physicians, forcing many rural residents to travel for hours even for basic procedures. Over the last two decades, nearly 200 rural hospitals have shut down. Hundreds more hospitals teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, threatening to deprive millions more people of vital nearby care.
In fact, a lack of adequate access to health care has contributed to the widening health gap between rural and urban Americans. From 2010 to 2019, while life expectancy rose in urban counties, it declined in rural parts of the country. In 2020, for example, rural counties experienced higher-than-average COVID-19 death rates. And in newly released research in the Southern Economic Journal, we show that misguided government policies are pouring fuel on this fire.
We study certificate-of-need (CON) laws, which require health care providers to obtain approval from state officials before offering new services, expanding facilities or investing in technology. Currently, CON laws exist in 35 states. A large amount of evidence shows that these regulations limit competition and drive up prices in the health care industry, but our study is one of the first to examine their impact on rural America.
Some policymakers insist that by controlling where additional health services can be offered, they can direct providers to invest more in geographically remote and underserved areas. Without CON laws, the argument goes, profit-hungry providers would solely focus on urban centers.
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