Lawsuits Argue That Certificates of Need Increase Costs

Two physicians — one in North Carolina and another in Iowa — think they have found at least a partial solution to rising medical costs and have filed lawsuits to clear the way.  The outcome of both cases is being closely watched by providers and insurers across the country. In North Carolina, an India-born physician has called into question a fundamental tenet of medicine in the majority of U.S. states: That a state review board, not the free market, should decide who gets to offer expensive medical procedures such as magnetic resonance imaging scans. Often u...