ATLANTA — State lawmakers debated the necessity of health care certificates of need this legislative session and are now leaving it to a committee to study the issue.

CON requirements were signed into federal law in the mid-1970s as a way to assess the availability and duplication of health care services within a certain radius. They were repealed by Congress nearly a decade later. According to the Mercatus Center in a 2016 report, 35 states and the District of Columbia still had CON restrictions.

Georgia Senators approved Senate Resolution 279 this year, establishing a committee to study reform CON and determine ways to have better health outcomes at lower costs, and to determine policies for financially struggling rural hospitals to survive and grow.

According to the resolution, the committee would be appointed solely by the president of the senate, Republican Lt. Gov. Burt Jones.

The committee must be comprised of seven members of the Senate and include the chairperson of the Senate Regulated Industries Committee and the chairperson of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee.

The committee is also required to consist of five citizen representatives that serve either in an executive role in a nonprofit health system; an executive role in a for-profit health system; an executive role in a rural hospital; practice medicine as an independent physician; or have expertise in health care costs and work in the insurance industry.

The committee, per the law, would be abolished on Dec. 1, 2023.

During the 2023 legislative session, senators passed SB 99 in 42-13 to exempt acute care hospitals looking to locate in rural counties (or counties with less than 50,000 residents) from adhering to CON requirements.

Sen. Greg Dolezal, (R-Cumming), the bill’s sponsor, said the proposal was the result of an undisclosed health care developer’s interest in building another hospital in Butts County where the population is less than 26,000. The county currently has Wellstar Sylvan Grove Medical Center in Jackson.

The Associate Press reports that Jones’ support for SB 99 could allow a new hospital to be built near his home in Butts County, adding that it could financially benefit his family if the hospital is built on land his father owns.

A broader proposal (SB 162) to get rid of CON requirements in most areas of health care was introduced this session by Savannah Republican Ben Watson. The bill was favorably reported out of the Senate Regulated Industries and Utilities Committee but was not brought to the Senate floor for a vote. Jesse Weathington is president of the Georgia Association of Health Plans. GAHP assesses health care policies and their impact on cost, quality and access to care, he said.

“CON has a perverse effect of increasing costs by creating scarcity and creating local monopolies, which take full advantage of their market power to aggressively increase prices,” said Weathington. “(CON) reduces access by creating scarcity in underserved communities, which will continue to remain underserved when that hospital closes despite its purported ability to protect hospitals from closing. They are still closing but it does still represent a barrier to replacement facilities being put into a community where there’s a gap in care.”

But Leo Reichert, executive vice president and general counsel for WellStar Health System — which operates facilities throughout the state — said eliminating CON would negatively affect existing facilities.

“In addition to the harm that this would cause simply by taking patients away from hospitals that are already struggling financially because they’re in areas that are not growing very much economically, we all know that there’s a workforce problem in health care,” Reichert said. “We’ve got two hospitals that are struggling to find staff to meet the needs of the community. … If you drop another hospital in, they’re going to wind up all three fighting for the same staff, and they’re obviously going to take some staff away from those two hospitals.”