IOWA CITY, Iowa, May 10 (UPI) -- Heart-attack patients are 15 percent less likely to get a "within days" heart bypass in states with medical restriction laws.
That according to a new study conducted by researchers at the University of Iowa that found that whether states have so-called certificate of need laws --aimed at curbing "unnecessary expansion of medical services" -- seems to affect whether a heart-attack patient will be given either bypass surgery or an angioplasty within the first few days of the heart attack.
However, the study further revealed that, although such procedures done within days of a heart attack are about 15-percent less frequent in CON states, patients in these states are also no more likely to experience adverse events, such as death, than heart-attack patients in non-CON states.
"The study implies that certificate of need programs, which require hospitals to obtain prior approval for establishing high-cost services, limit the growth of these services. In spite of limiting the diffusion of these services, CON regulations did not adversely affect patients," said Gary Rosenthal, the study's senior investigator and professor of internal medicine at the University of Iowa.
The researchers looked at the administrative records of 1,139,792 Medicare beneficiaries age 68 and older who had had heart attacks and had been admitted to 4,587 hospitals in the United States between 2000 and 2003.
The study results appear in the May 10 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
