State Sen. Larry Stutts (R-Tuscumbia) will file legislation in the upcoming legislative session exempting rural Alabama hospitals and health care facilities from certificate of need (CON).
In Alabama, any hospital or medical clinic that wants to open, add beds, or relocate must first obtain approval from the Certificate of Need Board. The governor appoints members to the CON Board.
Stutts told 1819 News in a recent interview that the bill would apply to around 46 counties and was modeled on previous legislation he filed in 2024.
"My rationale for re-filing that from two years ago, I mean, I saw this coming two years ago and thought we ought to be getting it done. Now we do have all this money for rural health, and if we're going to throw money at rural health for them to be innovative and expand services and all this, we need to get out of the way and let them do it," Stutts said. "If somebody in a rural hospital wants to add a service, they shouldn't have to go through a one to two year process to be able to do it; we need to be able to get it done now."
Stutts continued, "If they're going to do a $1 million project, they shouldn't have to spend 25-30-40% of the first money they spend on it just getting permission to do it."
"If what we were doing is working, we wouldn't be in the position we're in," Stutts said. "We've got one of the most restrictive CON laws in the country. Multiple other states that had CON laws have either repealed them or radically changed them, and ours haven't been changed in 20 years."
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