The Antitrust Attorney Blog
Author: Jarod Bona
We do our best to describe antitrust and other legal issues as straightforwardly as possible here. We tend to speak directly and avoid the guarded language that you often see from lawyers elsewhere (a little secret: most big-firm attorneys are afraid of getting in trouble in one way or another).
So, in case there was any doubt, I’ll tell you what I really think of certificate-of-need laws. These are laws, still on the books in many states, that actually require a new healthcare provider that wants to move into a market to get permission from the state to do so (a certificate of need). And, even more bizarre, the existing competitors—who certainly don’t want any more competition—often have a say or a role in whether the new provider receives a certificate of need, which can sometimes take months or years to obtain, if at all.
We hear all the time how important health and safety is: The sanctity of human life. Take care of yourself. Eat well. Exercise. Get your yearly physical. Follow your doctor’s advice.
We also hear complaints from every politician, news agency, and anyone that’s ever paid a medical bill about the costs of health care.
And, although healthcare workers have been heroes both before and during this pandemic, I think we would all agree that there is a lot of room for improvement in healthcare in the United States. I’ve been to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota many times and my son was born there, so I know how good healthcare can be. We have a lot of room to improve healthcare as a country.
I think we can all agree that healthcare is vitally important to us as human beings. That is what I hear the media tell me and what politicians preach all the time. And this makes sense: If you are sick or dying, getting better shoots up the priority list of needs and wants.
Switching gears briefly, here is something that I’ve learned as an antitrust attorney and as a student of economics: Markets with monopolists and markets with less competition have higher prices, lower supply, and lower quality for products and services.
Let’s say you are an evil troll that hates people. Let’s also say that you have the single opportunity to pass legislation in a state to hurt human beings that care about health and healthcare, but you don’t want it to be something that is so obvious that they’d just repeal it after your opportunity passes. You want something that is sneaky bad.
What would you do if you were that evil troll?
You’d pass certificate-of-need laws.
These laws are sneaky bad because it takes a couple steps of reasoning to see how they harm our health and healthcare. By creating the barrier to entry of these certificate-of-need laws, the evil troll can artificially limit the supply of healthcare, decrease its quality, and raise healthcare costs—almost without detection. And by offering the existing monopolist or provider an opportunity to participate in the process, the government agency is much less likely to award the certificate to improve people’s lives. At the very least, if the existing healthcare provider is involved, they will be able to help delay any competition.
Let’s say that you end up with a pandemic and really need a lot of hospital beds or other healthcare all at once. If that happens, the evil troll has won because their certificate-of-need laws are specifically designed to reduce the supply of healthcare, including hospital beds.
Bona Law opposes certificate of need laws and we call for their repeal and challenge. You can read our earlier article about certificate of need laws on this website here.
On April 28, 2020, Aaron Gott and I published an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune entitled “State Certificate-of-Need Laws for Hospitals Must Go: These anti-competition laws have left us unprepared for the current pandemic, with fewer hospital beds for care.”
I’ve published many articles over the years, on this website and in other publications. But this one is special for me because I grew up in Minnesota. As a kid (and, well, as an adult), I was a sports fanatic—football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and anything else involving physical competition. I learned math through sports statistics and couldn’t sleep on the Sunday nights when the Minnesota Vikings lost (that is still an issue, by the way).
I grew up before the internet and my gateway to what happened in sports when I couldn’t watch them was the Minneapolis Star Tribune paper. From a young age, I did most of my reading in the sports section. I would often read every word of it. I couldn’t get enough. The long Sunday mornings with the paper were heaven to me because they had extra statistics and a lot of extra stories, including the famous Sid Hartman (who is, remarkably, still going strong). I even read his book some years later.
So, to have an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune is a big deal to me. I just wish it were about sports.
Image by Mari Nicholson from Pixabay