Maggie Hassan is spending so much time talking about this year’s most critical political issues — abortion and contraception — that she does not have much time left to expound upon the virtues of her signature legislative iniative of two years ago: a bill to have state bureaucrats control hospital prices. Since her busy schedule just does not seem to leave her enough time to explain it, we though we would help her out and remind the voters how Hassan planned to handle the issue of rising hospital prices.

Hassan’s idea was to copy Maryland’s hospital rate review commission. That relic of the 1970s employs state bureaucrats to set prices that hospitals can charge their customers. The goal is to prevent large price differences. She wanted to finance the commission with a $3.5 million tax on hospitals.

As Josiah Bartlett Center President Charlie Arlinghaus pointed out at the time, Maryland’s commission was far from the innovative reform Hassan made it out to be. In fact, such agencies proliferated in the 1970s and more than 30 states adopted one. But they faded into history as states found that they did not work. When Hassan proposed her idea, only Maryland and West Virginia still had such price-setting agencies.

Hassan worried that small insurers could not negotiate the same discounts large insurers could. To let small insurers compete with big ones, she proposed state price controls that would forbid the hospitals from giving some insurers big discounts unavailable to others.

It is telling that Hassan saw a problem — a lack of robust competition among insurers — and immediately proposed to fix it with state price controls. It is even more telling because the problem was created by state regulations in the first place. In 1994, a bill sponsored by state Sen. Jeanne Shaheen created a community rating law that largely forbade insurers from setting people’s health insurance premiums based on how expensive they would be to insure. As a result, 21 insurers fled New Hampshire. The lack of competition Hassan complained about was caused by a regulation she supports.

If Hassan is governor, she certainly will pursue such heavy-handed policies again.