A few months ago, I was invited to testify at a policy hearing about Certificate-of-Need (CON) laws in South Carolina. CON laws are regulations that impose financial and bureaucratic costs by requiring healthcare providers who plan on offering a new healthcare service or an additional bed to first show to a regulatory body that their region needs the service or bed. After a few conversations with scholars involved in the hearing I quickly noticed something: When it comes to policy making, nursing homes are the “sacred cow” of healthcare policy.