A. Barton Hinkle on How Government Red Tape Strangles Free Enterprise

Ask Virginia’s Republican
lawmakers about Obamacare, and you can see the veins in their
foreheads start to throb. The law’s an excrescence, they will tell
you. It’s the big hand of government smashing a framing hammer down
on the invisible hand of Adam Smith. It’s socialist social policy
married to misguided industrial policy.

So why hasn’t the GOP led an assault on the state’s certificate
of public need law? As A. Barton Hinkle explains, the COPN law is
supply-side Obamacare: top-down, command-and-control restrictions
on which providers can offer which services. A certificate of
public need is, essentially, a government permission slip. Without
one, a Virginia doctor can’t put an MRI machine in his clinic. A
hospital can’t build a new wing. A hospital company can’t add a
satellite campus. And so on. The process strangles free enterprise
and squashes the idea of economic competition.

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