(via Michael Cannon at Cato )

Remote Area Medical‘s Stan Brock, who spoke at the Cato Institute’s 2012 State Health Policy Summit, explains:

Cannon continues:

The culprit is state medical licensing laws. For more, read Cato adjunct scholar Shirley Svorny.

Cannon’s original post at Cato-at-Liberty.

My understanding is that state-level medical licensing laws prohibit doctors from providing charity care outside the state where they are licensed. If so, the Colorado legislature should look into allowing out-of-state physicians, dentists, optometrists, etc., to practice charity care in Colorado. Of course, this is probably more of a problem in geographically smaller states with high population densities near their borders.