SC lawmakers tangled in debate over hospital expansion regulations

The fight to overhaul regulations for building and expanding hospitals and other medical facilities in South Carolina has been so combative that lawmakers may not resolve it this year.

The House Ways and Means committee this week passed a bill that took lawmakers six months to write, altering the certificate of need program and eliminating it entirely in 2020.

The process has been so exhausting that the leader of the group that wrote the bill, Rep. Murrell Smith, said he went from supporting the program to wondering why it even needed to exist.

The Sumter Republican said he still thinks certificate of need program works for smaller places like Sumter, Orangeburg and Aiken to make sure a large health care company doesn’t run smaller firms out of business and then reduce the amount of care. But he told Rep. Jim Merrill, who wants to kill the entire program, that he doesn’t think South Carolina’s large cities need it.

The bill that passed the committee would allow existing hospitals, medical centers and nursing homes to add beds within a mile of their facility. It also would allow hospitals to expand services that are already approved under the program and remove the need to seek permission to buy costly equipment.

Currently, such facilities must get permission to buy anything that costs more than $600,000 – approaching the cost of an average MRI scanner.

“Is this really going to end it, for real? Or is this just a stall?” asked Rep. Phillip Lowe, R-Florence and a physical therapist and developer. “There will be two more General Assemblies elected by then. Half of them won’t have heard this discussion. They’ll be fooled again.”

The program nearly died in July 2013 when Gov. Nikki Haley vetoed the $2 million that the Department of Health and Environmental Control uses to run the program.

This story was originally published April 24, 2015 at 8:35 PM with the headline "SC lawmakers tangled in debate over hospital expansion regulations."