Last night, the Georgia Public Policy Foundation received the State Policy Network’s Bob Williams Award for Outstanding Policy Achievement. This is the second year in a row that the Foundation has won a national award for our work.
The Foundation won the Best Issue Campaign category for helping to reform the state’s Certificate of Need laws. Georgia has some of the most oppressive CON laws in the country. Studies have shown that these laws lead to higher costs and less access for Georgians, particularly in rural areas. But change is hard.
This year, we launched a video series and social media campaign highlighting the negative impact of the state’s existing CON laws on patients and providers. These videos had more than 500,000 views, with our content having more than 2 million impressions and reaching 1 million people.
As we’ve said, the award is a nice recognition. But the reforms are what matter. They matter for the Atlanta patient whose health system closed her local hospital—after years spent fighting to keep out any new providers. They matter for the Augusta midwife who wants to open a birthing center without needing the permission of the local hospitals she’d compete against. And they matter for the Athens patient with Stage 4 lung cancer who is forced to drive to a hospital for PET scans after his oncologist was prevented from acquiring the same equipment.
The Foundation focused on each of these specific areas, and we saw reforms in each. This isn’t the end of the story, or the end of the fight, but this is concrete progress that will have a positive impact on many Georgians.
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