Health Care a Hot Topic at Legislative Interims

Lawmakers have tackled health care issues at several different angles during this month's three-day series of interim meetings, which end Wednesday:

• The Associated Press writes that legislators expect to revisit the debate over continuing the state's "Certificate of Need" system for regulating health care services. A state agency "issues more than two dozen of those certificates for everything from expanding heart surgery procedures to opening methadone clinics," AP health care writer Tom Breen reports. (Update: Breen has the blow-by-blow from the hearing.)
  

• AP delved earlier into the interim study of data-mining, in which mountains of information reflecting such doctor-patient interactions as drugs prescribed are sold to the pharmacuetical industry and other interests for marketing purposes. The Charleston Gazette covered that hearing as well.

• The Gazette and AP also report on the latest update provided to lawmakers on the overcrowding crisis afflicting West Virginia's state-run mental hospitals. The Charleston newspaper has a separate overview of the crowding problem as well.