Village Idiots: Florida Legislature Passes Bill That Will Increase Access to “Healthcare Providers”
If the USA is a village, then the village idiot lives in the Florida legislature. Never mind increasing scope of practice via increased education, more standardized education, and more stringent licensing exams, nope. Let’s just con a few village idiots, I mean legislators, and legislate the increased scope of practice. This bill is not a win. The very first sentence of the article has been proven to not be true (2): The Florida Legislature passed a bill on Wednesday that would provide Floridians greater access to healthcare, particularly in rural and underserved communities. This is a con job.
The measure, which passed after it was amended by the Senate on Tuesday, allows Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs) more autonomy to deliver health care for patients during a time where the state is facing problems meeting the demand for health care providers due to an influx in population.
I am not Anti-NP, I am anti lies and manipulation. I have stated before and will state again, one discipline is not responsible for nor a replacement for shortages in another discipline. A novel idea would be to replace the shortage of primary care physicians with primary care physicians and this can be done by increasing the amount of primacy care residency positions. Having experienced the education process of both becoming an NP then an MD, I can report that I was ill prepared to assume full independent practice without physician collaboration. Collaboration made me a better and safer provider. The educational preparation of an NP and MD is vastly different, and the health care environment would be a better place if disciplines could stay in their own lanes. So the next time you happen upon a village and it’s missing it’s proverbial idiot, you can be rest assured that you can find them in the Florida legislature.
References:
- https://thecapitolist.com/legislature-passes-bill-that-will-increase-access-to-healthcare-providers/
- https://authenticmedicine.com/2019/05/straw-man-the-dishonesty-needs-to-stop/
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Politically, I admire Communism greatly, and am very sad that it totally doesn’t work. It’s like legislating the Easter Bunny. Lowering value means lowering availability, because nobody will sign up for a sucker’s deal, not rural nurse practitioners, nobody. Translated into today’s money, the butcher shops in the old Soviet Union charged 10¢ a pound for steak, but they were all out. If you are all out, you can swear up-and-down that we’re talking prime porterhouse steak or ribeye, not some slice off a washed-up dairy cow. If you ain’t got it, you can promise the best! But, like next week’s vaccine against Coronavirus, it ain’t here. In the good old USSR, you could finagle a tasty cut of steak from one of those shady drifters hanging around the train station, but it will cost you $50 bucks a pound. Disgusting greed-monger! But he had the steak wrapped up and under his coat, here you go. That’s the inevitability of price manipulation, and the People’s Republic of Florida will have a go at it. Sooner or later they can lower the value of a healthcare provider to someone who watches the Home Health Channel, give them prescribing rights, and hey! there will be something in the store for 10¢ a pound. What it is, God only knows.
This piece is exactly right. I live and practice in a designated underserved county in Florida, where it is incredibly difficult to recruit primary care physicians. This – along with lost pay and many predatory lawyers – will only make it worse.
Every increase in lesser trained healthcare workers has been under the guise of increasing access. In Iowa estheticians with only 6 months of watching videos as their training and not even a required high school biology course we’re given the right to operate lasers unsupervised as it would increase access. Not one esthetician has set up or located a major clinic in a city smaller than 50,000 people. All of them have been set up to compete against practitioners in the larger cities who incidentally are required to take emergency room call coverage. But the rural legislatures fall for the guys of increasing access which never happens. Now we have chains of laser clinics with no physicians on site. Yet the public wants physicians to provide emergency room call free of charge as if we’re in some sort of medieval times. We physicians need a union to fight back in state the obvious that if they are going to give privileges to other people who aren’t required to take call then call needs to be compensated like it’s regular work hours. It also needs to count against our total work hours for retirement just like firefighters. If we’re on the front lines like firefighters risking our health then our pension should be paid for by the government and retirement in our 50s shouldn’t be unheard of. Calculating out the national average wage for firefighters and including pensions means most physicians probably make the same or less per hour worked and yet have higher levels of education. This is not to demean firefighters but to show how everybody puts physicians as overpaid and forgets the time value of money and all the uncompensated hours.
Physicians did, in fact unionize, in the South Seattle suburbs, to Tacoma. A “Big Box” called Multicare. You would join a union if you worked there, I know I would.
https://www.uapd.com/washington/
https://www.uapd.com/multicare/
https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/article109104257.html