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Senate Co-Sponsorship Memoranda
Senate of Pennsylvania
Session of 2013 - 2014
Regular Session
MEMORANDUM
| Posted: | December 13, 2012 11:28 AM |
|---|---|
| From: | Senator Jim Ferlo |
| To: | All Senate members |
| Subject: | Reenacting a Certificate of Need Program |
| In the near future I plan to re-introduce Senate Bill 1542 to reenact, update, and improve Pennsylvania’s Certificate of Need (CON) program. The legislation is intended to help control health care costs by giving the Department of Health and a newly-created Certificate of Need Review Board the power to review proposed hospital expenditures to expand facilities or add new clinically-related health care services. Pennsylvania had a CON program throughout the 1980’s and early 90’s, however the program was sunset in 1996. Since that time, the state has experienced enormous expansion of hospital facilities and ever increasing healthcare costs. We need to reenact this program to provide at least one check on our growing healthcare expenditures. The program will be designed to encourage the deployment of best practices; to add new services to fill voids in the healthcare system; to prevent new, expensive, and duplicative services which add costs; and/or add services which helps to reduce costs through competition. This will be accomplished through continuous updating of the State Health Improvement Plan by the Department of Health in close consultation with the Health Planning Board. The State Health Improvement Plan will pinpoint the healthcare needs and saturation points within geographic regions for facilities and services. My legislation will more specifically: 1) Require the Department of Health, in consultation with the Health Policy Board, to draft and publicize the State Health Improvement Plan. A plan will be provided for each region of the state to guide hospitals to fill gaps in needed services and provide the CON review board on the quantitative and qualitative standards for reviewing CON applications. 2) Establish an 11 member CON review board, appointed by the Governor with the consent of the Senate. The CON review board will have specific expertise in healthcare economics and will be charged with reviewing each CON application and to issue CON’s when appropriate. The CON review board is also required to hold public hearings in the area a CON application is filed. 3) Reenact Chapter 7 of the Health Care Facilities Act, which was sunset in 1996, to once again establish the CON program in state law. The program will require the CON review board to approve any new hospital capital facility over $2 million, new equipment or facility improvements in an ambulatory surgical facility over $1 million, and any new high-cost technology over $500,000. Furthermore, the CON review board must approve the addition of any new clinically-related health service identified in the State Health Improvement Plan. 4) Require the Secretary of the Department of Health, in order to help in the review process of each filed CON application, to appoint a community based health services planning committee composed of local elected officials and other decision makers to provide insight on whether or not a proposed facility or service is needed. 5) Require the CON review board to approve or deny the CON application. Once the State Health Improvement Plan has identified the healthcare needs or excesses in a region and/or community, it will become the guiding document for the CON review board to approve or disapprove applications for the construction of new or added facilities or clinically related health care services. All forms of health care providers will be required to submit applications when building new, or adding onto existing facilities, or adding clinical services. The CON review will receive the applications and work cooperatively with community-based health planning committees to determine the appropriateness of the application. The CON board, with the guidance of the State Health Improvement Plan, and the community based health planning committee, will have the power to prohibit the construction or addition of the new service. The CON review board will be comprised of technical experts in the fields of medicine, health facility administration, health economics, health care cost inflation and the like, including experts from within the Commonwealth agencies, together with health care consumers. The community based health planning committee will be comprised of local elected officials, representatives of the communities to be served by the new facility of services, professionals from the region in the field of medicine and hospital administration, business sector, labor, and health insurance. This process, in total, will allow for a more efficient, coordinated, and cost effective method of deploying our regional health care assets, while at the same time providing better public health care. In the previous session SB 1542 was co-sponsored by Senators Fontana, Tartaglione, Boscola, and Earll. |
Introduced as SB809