By Sendhil Mullainathan and Richard H. Thaler | The New York Times
These are scary times. The world is living through the double whammy of a pandemic health care crisis and a possible global economic depression.
Fighting the coronavirus is hard enough. Government regulations shouldn’t make it any harder. But that’s exactly what’s happening.
We have identified five kinds of regulations that we believe are hindering us in what amounts to a war of survival. They should be paused for now, and some might be usefully eliminated forever.
There are undoubtedly others we have missed, and we ask for your suggestions about those, too.
Fully deploy all qualified medical professionals.
We face an acute shortage of medical workers, yet red tape is keeping people who could help on the sidelines.
One example is medical licensing, which, in the United States, is done at the state level. Qualified professionals licensed in one state cannot practice if they happen to have moved somewhere else. Let’s instead treat medical licenses like we do driver’s licenses. New York State has already implemented this policy.
