So McCain picked Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. We quickly learned that she eats caribou and loves jogging, but we wanted to know what she�s been up to in health-care policy.
One interesting fight she�s joined is the push to get rid of an Alaska law that says hospitals or clinics can only build new facilities if state regulators agree the facilities are needed.
The feds used to require this sort of thing, known as a certificate-of-need program. The requirement disappeared in the mid-�80s, but lots of states still have the rules on the books. As this 2002 WSJ story shows, there�s been a rolling fight in various states for years over whether to keep the rules in place.
In February, Palin wrote an op-ed in the Anchorage Daily News arguing that scrapping Alaska�s certificate-of-need program would improve access and quality and lower prices, by allowing supply to expand to meet demand. (Florida Republican Gov. Charlie Crist has been arguing for similar changes in his state.)
But supporters of such programs point to data from sources such as the Dartmouth Atlas, a long-running research project whose findings suggest that building excess health-care capacity can actually lead patients to receive unneeded treatments. They say hospitals and clinics need to fill patient beds and run lots of tests to pay for a new wing or a fancy new scanner.
Like the national argument, the situation in Alaska remains unresolved. Legislation Palin backed to repeal the Alaska�s certificate-of-need rules � here�s the state Senate version of the bill � has yet to pass the state legislature.
Photo: Reuters
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