Every state except LA had a CON law.. You can't restrain supply for a couple of decades, then repeal the law, and immediately say: see, there's no difference.
We're already seeing a difference in prices after a few years[0].. and it takes years and hundreds of millions of dollars (up to $1B+) for a hospital to go from a proposal to operating:
CON laws raise overall healthcare spending by 3.1 percent—5.0 percent for physician care. As for type of provider, while CON has little effect on Medicaid spend- ing, it increases overall Medicare spending by 6.9 percent.
States that repealed CON laws have seen overall healthcare spending reduced by 0.8 percent per year, leveling out to a 4 percent drop after year five. The greatest decline in spending is with physicians at 1.4 percent per year, compared to a drop of 0.3 percent per year in hospital expenditures.
And by constraining supply of beds, hospitals redirected investment into equipment, increasing per-unit costs of providing care [1,2]. Arguably CON laws have contributed to unnecessary tests (since hospitals need to use the equipment they buy to pay for it), and use of more expensive equipment than necessary.
Of course this isn't the sole problem with our health system... there are many that contribute to the problem. But CON laws are negative, and are one of the issues we need to deal with if we want to reduce health costs.
http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/con-certificate-of-need-...
States that don't have them don't have dramatically lower prices.