(The Center Square) — For anyone looking to follow in her footsteps, Katie Chubb has a simple piece of advice: Consider South Carolina.
With the help of the Pacific Legal Foundation, Chubb has been fighting the state’s Certificate of Need mandate on behalf of her business, the Augusta Birthing Center. In a state where officials routinely tout their support of business — and small business — Chubb has encountered the CON mandate, which requires the state to approve her facility.
Critics like Chubb say it stifles small and independent businesses, while proponents say it is necessary to protect patients. A Georgia Senate committee is exploring whether the state should amend its CON requirement, which would follow the action lawmakers in neighboring South Carolina and Florida have taken.
“I would say I feel like we’re pro-large business; are we really pro-small business?” Chubb told The Center Square in an interview following Americans for Prosperity-GA’s inaugural Pathway to Prosperity Summit. “I think the small businesses, the family-run businesses, often get left behind and that with certificate of need, we see that the larger businesses that can spend years fighting this regulation prosper.
“The smaller businesses get left behind, and that’s where Pacific Legal Foundation has stepped up to help us as a smaller family-run business,” Chubb added. “We did not have the resources to fight this, and that’s where they’re really helping us out.”
A spokesman for Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, did not respond to a request for comment. Lt. Governor Burt Jones, a Republican, has publicly expressed his support for CON reform.
“My greatest fear is, and it kind of plays out every year in the legislature, that we have different groups … that will come and say, ‘This is good for rural Georgia,'” state Sen. Freddie Powell-Sims, D-Dawson, said during a recent CON hearing. “…Sometimes, the legislation is written to accommodate rural Georgia. But most times, it doesn’t play out that way. We really get the short end of the stick.
“…As we move forward with our conversations around the CON, we want to hear the truth; we want to hear how are you going to all write legislation that will positively impact rural Georgia,” Powell-Sims added. “We know that there’s … no magic wand here, but we really want to hear the truth about it.”
According to Georgians For a Healthy Future, nine rural Georgia hospitals have closed since 2010.
“There’s never a single reason that a rural hospital closes, but it can’t be that CON is the saving grace here,” Jaimie Cavanaugh, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, said during a June CON hearing. “The available evidence shows it’s probably the opposite. And using CON laws to suppress the supply of healthcare just decreases access to care and makes it possible that Georgia is going to start losing patients to more competitive states now that Georgia’s neighboring states, South Carolina and Florida, have done such significant reforms.”
