How do Healthcare Regulations Affect Access to Care and Self-Assessed Health?

Whether and to what extent healthcare regulations impede access to care, thereby worsening health outcomes, is the subject of extensive debate among health economists and health policy experts. However, the literature typically focuses on only one regulation at a time, such as certificate-of-need (CON) laws or occupational licensing requirements. Newly available data from the Mercatus Center uses machine-learning-based textual analysis of federal and state laws to quantify the number of healthcare regulations as well as classify them by type. These data provide a unique opportunity to study the total effect of the entire regulatory environment present in each state at particular points in time. Additionally, the categorization of the regulations enables an investigation of which types of laws have the greatest effect.