Mississippi’s lawmakers will once again work to reform the state’s certificate of need laws after Republican Gov. Tate Reeves vetoed a bill that would do so last year.
The 2026 legislative session kicked off on Tuesday, and the House of Representatives was quickly moved to revisit a measure that was axed by the state’s top elected official. House Bill 569 from the 2025 session was reintroduced after having been vetoed and referred to the Public Health and Human Services Committee.
“We’ll be back with that bill. I don’t know that there’s an appetite to override the veto of the CON legislation that the governor vetoed at the end of last session,” House Speaker Jason White said ahead of the session on Monday. “But if not, you’ll see the house moving pretty quickly with a new CON bill that mirrors the one that was vetoed, which may remove the offending language that the governor’s office had a problem with.”
For those unfamiliar with the concept, certificate of need laws, also known as CON laws, originated at the state level in New York in 1964 and were federally mandated in 1974 to lower healthcare costs and prevent unnecessary duplication of services. The regulations require healthcare providers to seek the government’s approval for certain projects and capital expenditures — money spent to acquire or maintain fixed assets like land, buildings, and equipment.
To mitigate the effects of these regulations, the bill doubled the capital expenditure, or spending on a project that is not typically considered a normal operating expense, for clinical and nonclinical services. The legislation also directed the Mississippi State Department of Health to assess the feasibility of exempting small hospitals from having to go through the CON process for dialysis centers and removed some of the red tape hospitals often find themselves running into.
However, while Reeves supported the spirit of the bill, he called into question an “11th-hour” amendment made by Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee Chairman Hob Bryan, D-Amory, in late March.
“Unfortunately, due to an 11th-hour floor amendment added in the MS Senate, my duty to faithfully adhere to the MS Constitution and the US Constitution requires me to veto this bill in its current form,” Reeves wrote at the time on X. “Specifically, the amendment added by Public Health Chairman Hob Bryan (Democrat-Amory) is not simply bad public policy, but it violates the doctrine of separation of powers.”
The governor went on to interject that the addition to the legislation requires a specific hospital within a particular city to undergo the CON process. The amendment surrounded ongoing litigation between Merit Health and St. Dominic’s Hospital in Jackson.
Texas-based Oceans Healthcare opened a behavioral hospital where St. Dominic’s Hospital’s mental health division used to reside in Jackson. The Mississippi State Department of Health approved a lease agreement between Oceans and St. Dominic’s for inpatient and outpatient behavioral health services. Merit Health, another local medical provider, objected and filed a lawsuit.
While the State Health Department determined that St. Dominic’s and Oceans did not need to go through the CON process to finalize their agreement, Merit officials disagreed and took the courts to block the behavioral hospital from coming to fruition. In response, Senator Bryan inserted the following amendment, which was adopted by his colleagues, to HB 569:
“The State Department of Health shall issue a certificate of need to any psychiatric hospital located in Jackson, Mississippi, which was providing adult psychiatric services as of January 1, 2025, under a certificate of need which was transferred to them within the past five years; which new certificate of need shall authorize the same services as the existing certificate of need, provided that the hospital relinquish its existing certificate of need effective as of the date that the new certificate of need takes effect.”
In the House, White made it clear that he intends to have the amendment removed to satisfy the governor’s request. Members of the Public Health and Welfare Committee, chaired by New Albany Republican Sam Creekmore, did not take up the measure on the first day of the new session.