CON repeal, a Morrisey priority, fails again as WV House strongly rejects discharging bill to floor
Dels. Matthew Rohrbach, Brandon Steele and J.B. Akers discuss House Rules at the speaker's podium on Friday, March 28, 2025, as confusion dominated the debate to discharge House Bill 2007 from committee to the floor. (Perry Bennett | West Virginia Legislative Photography)
Another nail was hammered into the coffin of Certificate of Need repeal on Friday, as the West Virginia House of Delegates overwhelmingly voted down — after a drawn out 'fiasco' over rules and procedure — a motion to discharge House Bill 2007.
With 10 members absent and not voting, lawmakers in the body voted 72-15 against discharging the bill.
The discharge motion, if successful, would have brought the original version of HB 2007 — a bill to totally repeal the Certificate of Need process in the state — to the House floor, where the full body would have considered it for the first time.
The bill died last month in the House Committee on Health and Human Resources when lawmakers voted 13-12 against it.
Del. Chris Anders, R-Berkeley, made the motion to discharge the bill from committee and to the floor, saying members should support his motion because HB 2007 'will end the government created monopoly on health care.'
In response to Anders, Del. Carl Martin, R-Upshur, immediately made a motion to table his discharge motion.
But Martin's motion, said Del. Matthew Rohrbach, R-Cabell, who was acting as speaker, was out of order and not allowed based on rules of the chamber. This is despite a motion to table a discharge motion previously being successful earlier this session. That previous motion and vote, Rohrbach said, should have been out of order as well.
Del. Brandon Steele, R-Raleigh, called for a motion to overturn Rohrbach's ruling, which was supported by House counsel as well as the House parliamentarian and House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, who was not present Friday.
'What are we even doing here?!' Steele exclaimed, before his motion failed 58-31.
With that failed vote, and after several back-and-forths regarding the technicalities of the House Rules as well as Mason's Manual of Legislative Procedure — the rulebook that dictates House actions this year alongside the chamber's own rules — Rohrbach's ruling that Martin's motion to table the discharge motion was out of order stood as the rule of the chamber.
The body then voted down Anders' original discharge motion, laying HB 2007 to rest yet again.
Repealing Certificate of Need in West Virginia was one of only two health care policies that Gov. Patrick Morrisey announced as priorities for his first legislative session this year. The other policy — adding religious and philosophical exemptions to the state's vaccine mandates — failed on the House floor earlier this week.
During his State of the State, Morrisey called the Certificate of Need process 'big government activism at its worst' and promised that by repealing it, the state would 'move toward the free market.'
Bills to repeal CON have been introduced in the Legislature annually since at least 2017. This year marked the second time ever that the bill made it to a committee, as well as the second time it was voted down by that committee.
CON is a regulatory process, overseen by the West Virginia Health Care Authority, that requires entities looking to create or expand health care services in the state to receive a legal document proving those new services fit an unmet need in the area.
Through the Health Care Authority, those interested in obtaining a Certificate of Need receive technical assistance before applying to see what need they are meeting. Services are approved through a needs methodology and different services — such as hospice care, ambulatory centers, clinics, private practices and specialty services — have different methodologies.
Proponents for the repeal believe that doing away with the laws will allow more competition in health care across West Virginia. Those against repeal worry that doing away with the process will hurt West Virginia's more rural and vulnerable populations, where a lack of regulation could threaten what services are offered to the 75% of residents who are government payers, meaning their health insurance comes from Medicare, Medicaid or the Public Employees Insurance Agency.
While the House's version of the bill to repeal Certificate of Need seems relatively dead — all bills must be at least on first reading on the floor in their chambers of origin by Sunday — another bill has been introduced in the Senate that would do the same. Lawmakers there, however, have yet to touch it and seem unlikely to do so.
In past years, there have been Hail Mary attempts to amend a total repeal of certificate of need into other bills that deal with the same section of code. It's possible the same could happen this year, as several bills that touch on Certificate of Need are still circulating as crossover day approaches next week.
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