Abstract
Certificate of need (CON) laws restrict the supply of medical services, from nursing home beds to the number of dialysis machines per hospital. These restrictions have the potential to lower the standard of care people receive. This paper empirically investigates how CON laws affect emergency department wait times and finds that CON laws have a statistically significant impact on increasing the median wait time for medical examination, pain medication administration, hospital admittance, and hospital discharge. These findings support the idea that movement toward a freer market for health care services through a reduction in CON laws could improve patient outcomes.