North Carolina sees transforming healthcare landscape

North Carolina is going through a bit of a healthcare transformation.

Democratic Gov. Ray Cooper’s administration announced the state will expand Medicaid on October 1, despite lawmakers not having yet allocated funding for the initiative. About 600,000 residents are expected to benefit from the Medicaid expansion.

The Winston-Salem Journal, however, pointed out that Republicans threw “a monkey wrench” into the expansion plans by adding guidelines that would revamp the state’s certificate of need (CON) program.

“The new CON changes targets include: repealing the CON requirements for mobile MRI machines, linear accelerators, physician office-based vascular access for hemodialysis, and kidney disease treatment centers; and repealing CON for ambulatory surgical centers and facilities with MRI machines affecting counties with a population under 125,000 that do not have a hospital,” according to the Winston-Salem Journal.

Thirty-five states and DC have CON programs, which are overseen by a jurisdiction’s health department and regulate the types of construction and other projects a hospital can take on. North Carolina’s CON program is already one of the strictest in the nation, James Bailey, an associate professor of economics at Providence College whose research focuses on health economics and healthcare regulation, said in 2021.

The state is also considering a law that generally limits a hospital authority’s territorial boundary to an area of up to 10 miles from the city or county in which it was created—with some exceptions. Lawmakers, who are on break through August 7, still have to resolve “their outstanding budgetary issues when they return and approve their final conference report the week of August 14,” Politico reported.