From The Porterville Recorder
Posted: 08/29/2009 10:00:00 PM PDT
From The Porterville Recorder
It has been both dismaying and heartwarming to see news of the gigantic free clinic being held at the Forum in Inglewood this month. It is dismaying that so many people, for various reasons, do not have health insurance or feel they couldn't afford proper medical care, to the point that more potential patients showed up than the volunteer doctors, dentists and other health care professionals could handle.
(Sponsoring organization Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps.) founder Stan Brock says the Los Angeles-area clinic was the first offered in a major metropolitan area. It certainly demonstrated that there is pent-up demand for medical care, especially if it is free of charge. But there are problems that reduce the organization's effectiveness.
"The greatest impediment that we face in giving this type of care - free care," Mr. Brock told Los Angeles Times writer David Lazarus, "is that, for some extraordinary reason that I've never been able to understand, a doctor, dentist or nurse licensed and trained in one state is not allowed to take that license and cross into other states to provide free care for needy and underserved Americans."
The ostensible reason for such restrictive licensing laws is that state governments need to ensure licensing standards are met. Candis Cohen of the Medical Board of California insists that "we don't know how well someone may have been trained in Texas or Alaska or somewhere else.
That is disingenuous at best. Medical licensing, like most forms of occupational licensing, was devised specifically to limit the number of licensed physicians and boost the incomes of practitioners. Setting high hurdles for practitioners from other states - eminent physicians can get temporary licenses if they're at a teaching hospital and ordinary physicians who move here must be requalified to be licensed here - is a form of protectionism. Such protectionism is one of the reasons U.S. health care costs are so high.
There is a good argument that forbidding health practitioners from other states to participate even in charitable events, as is the case in most states (only Tennessee has an "open borders to doctors" law) runs afoul of the interstate-commerce provisions of the Constitution, which was originally intended to prevent state discrimination against interstate commerce and to create, in effect, a free-trade zone within the U.S. It would be interesting to see a challenge to the licensing laws on these grounds.
In the meantime, California should, at the least, pass a law allowing physicians and other health care providers to offer medical services on a charitable basis without undue bureaucratic restrictions at events like the clinic at the Forum. Even better would be to emulate Tennessee and pass an "open borders for doctors" law.
http://www.dailybreeze.com/opinions/ci_13231382Now we know why doctors can't cross state lines....
"Medical licensing, like most forms of occupational licensing, was devised specifically to limit the number of licensed physicians and boost the incomes of practitioners"
Why can't Obama sign an executive order to temporary open it up?
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