Op-Ed: Steve Roberts: West Virginia’s healthcare guardrails: Ensuring quality and access
July 16, 2025
The health and well-being of West Virginia citizens is everyone’s business. Hospitals, local clinics, physicians, and so many others work together to provide quality care at the most affordable price possible for health and wellness throughout our state. West Virginia’s Certificate of Need process helps to ensure quality of care, good accessibility to providers, and, importantly, allows our hospitals to provide the best quality of care in as many locations as possible throughout West Virginia.
The West Virginia Chamber of Commerce is a private, voluntary membership organization made up of your friends and neighbors who are fiercely loyal to our state and its people. Chamber members employ over half of the state’s entire workforce. Our members care about our state’s hospitals and the health and well-being of our West Virginia neighbors.
Most states use a Certificate of Need process to assure quality and provide access to health providers. These guardrails are needed to protect health and ensure quality, and they are important and useful. Not all health needs are the same; wellness checkups are not the same as major surgery, for example.
Most states, including ours, recognize that assuring a wide range of quality health services is in the public interest. Certificate of Need helps to ensure the broadest range of services in healthy, well-staffed hospitals and health facilities.
It is important to know that West Virginia hospitals have been able to keep their expenses per inpatient day significantly below the national average. In fact, our expenses are the lowest of any surrounding state.
Some agenda-driven, out-of-state national think tanks are sometimes quoted as a source by those who want to eliminate Certificate of Need. These outside groups do not know the needs of West Virginia’s communities, and we should not follow their lead.
The patient mix in West Virginia is not the same as every other state. Each state is different, and for that reason, each state makes its own rules for Certificate of Need.
Small states with many rural residents have a different healthcare provider mix than large states with many residents in big cities. States tailor their healthcare rules to meet the needs of their citizens.
The West Virginia Certificate of Need process is noted for providing guardrails that allow our healthcare providers to operate in a manner that provides a broad range of quality services to as many regions of our state as possible. West Virginians need and deserve top-quality hospitals, and our laws help provide a proven process that gives us access to the health services we need.
The West Virginia Legislature has safeguarded the Certificate of Need process for the benefit of the specific needs of our state’s residents. Thank you to our legislators for actively studying this issue and reaching the conclusion that guardrails in healthcare, as in other areas of life, improve health, allow access to needed services, and improve life in West Virginia.
Steve Roberts is the President of the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce. Members of the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce are your small business neighbors. Chamber members employ over half of our state’s workforce and are found across our state. More information on the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce can be found at www.wvchamber.com
Op-Ed by Steve Roberts, President, West Virginia Chamber of Commerce