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Recommendation - SUPPORT
HB847: This bill creates a Health Care Facility Right to Visit Act that guarantees patients in licensed health facilities the ability to receive visitors, including during public health emergencies, while granting facilities immunity from liability for complying.
Full Analysis
A vote for this bill is a vote to protect patients and families from blanket visitation bans by hospitals and similar facilities, even during emergencies, while shielding those facilities from lawsuits for following these visitation protections.
Key Provisions & Tradeoffs
Prohibits licensed or certificate-of-need health care facilities from adopting policies that limit patient visitation by designated family or friends for stays over 24 hours, including during declared public health emergencies.
Requires facilities to allow at least two designated visitors for at least two hours per day, while still allowing facilities to impose reasonable safety requirements on visitation.
Grants health care facilities immunity from damages in liability actions arising from their compliance with the act, in addition to any existing immunities.
Liberty Analysis
This bill is a response to the sweeping visitation bans seen during COVID-era emergency policies. It limits both state-driven and facility-driven overreach by creating a baseline right for patients in regulated health facilities to receive visits from family or friends, including during declared public health emergencies. From a civil liberties and human dignity standpoint, it curtails the ability of health bureaucracies and facilities to isolate individuals in long hospital or long-term care stays, reinforcing that emergency powers must still respect basic human and family contact.
From a limited-government perspective, the bill cuts in two directions. On one hand, it is a state mandate on private and quasi-private facilities, specifying minimum visitation access and hours, which is a regulatory constraint on how those businesses operate. On the other hand, that mandate operates as a restriction on both government and corporate power to impose draconian lockdown-style visitation bans. Given the recent history of very heavy-handed state and facility restrictions that severely harmed patients and families, the net direction here is pro-liberty: it constrains emergency powers and bureaucratic discretion in favor of individual and family rights.
Economically, the bill does not create new spending, agencies, or enforcement structures, and it explicitly reduces legal exposure for facilities by granting them immunity when they comply with this visitation-rights framework. There may be marginal compliance and operational costs to manage visitation under various safety protocols, but these are modest and largely operational, not major fiscal burdens. The added immunity also somewhat offsets liability risk that could otherwise encourage excessive restriction. Overall, it modestly improves liberty by codifying a baseline right to visitation and limiting the ability of both state and institutional actors to use emergencies as a pretext for extreme isolation policies, without expanding spending or taxation.

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