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By Grant D. Bosse

Summary: Certificate of Need laws, or CONs, have been set up across the country under the assumption that rationing hospital construction and expansion would limit increases in health care costs. Four decades of experience have shown that CONs do not control costs, but do provide a significant barrier to entry to innovative health care facilities and limit competition in the health care marketplace. Faced with this evidence, CON supporters have created novel arguments to justify them, but these new rationales also fall under close scrutiny. New Hampshire should end its thirty-year experiment and repeal its Certificate of Need Law.

Click here to download a copy of the study

[pdf http://www.jbartlett.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Irrational-Certificate-of-Need-Laws.pdf]