Another bill Kansas Governor Sam Brownback should veto

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback has another opportunity to promote and protect individual liberty by blocking expansion of an ever-growing regulatory state.

It took a bit of legislative wrangling, but on Sunday May 1 HB 2615 passed the Kansas Senate by a vote of 40 to zero, and the Kansas House of Representatives by 115 to seven. In its final form, the bill allows physicians and dentists to satisfy a portion of their continuing education requirements by providing charity care to medically indigent persons.¹

This bill provides an opportunity to examine and reconsider the purpose of occupational licensure. Most fundamentally: In the case of physicians and dentists, we trust them with our health, our very lives. Can’t we trust them to do whatever they believe is necessary to stay up-to-date in their field without the government requiring a specific number of hours of continuing education? By the way, how does the state of Kansas know how many hours of continuing education are necessary to stay current? Is it the same in all branches of medicine and dentistry? That’s what the Kansas regulations imply.

In Kansas, physicians must participate in 50 hours of continuing medical education annually. This education requirement is satisfied by participating in “activity designed to maintain, develop, or increase the knowledge, skills, and professional performance of persons licensed to practice a branch of the healing arts.”²

But HB 2615 will let physicians satisfy 20 hours of this requirement by providing 40 hours of health care to needy people. Having doctors perform routine medical care — doing their daily job, in other words — doesn’t seem likely to advance the “knowledge, skills, and professional performance” of doctors, which is the stated goal of the regulation.

We have, therefore, a regulation that has a plausibly reasonable purpose — ensuring that physicians and dentists are up-to-date in professional knowledge — instead being used by the state to “encourage” them to provide free labor.

Charity is good. It’s wonderful. It’s why I regularly engage in charitable activity. But it isn’t charity when government is forcing you to do something. I have a feeling that many healthcare professionals already provide much charitable care. But now Kansas wants them to enter into an agreement with the Secretary of Health and Environment to provide gratuitous services if they want credit for performing care as a way to avoid continuing education requirements. Again: If continuing medical education is necessary, why let it be avoided by providing charity care? By allowing the performance of routine medical care to substitute for continuing education, isn’t the state creating a risk to physicians’ regular patients?

Governor Brownback has shown by his veto of SB 338 this year that he has the capacity to appreciate individual rights. In 2012 his veto of SB 353 shows he has an appreciation of the harm of burdensome regulation.

Now, Governor Brownback has another opportunity to promote individual liberty and block the expansion of an ever-growing regulatory state.

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