Senate Co-Sponsorship Memoranda

Across the country, state lawmakers are recklessly trying to introduce the culture wars into doctors’ offices and forcing government and politicians into the most intimate and private medical settings for patients. Patients deserve a medical setting free from politics and harmfully inaccurate mandates on what they can discuss with their patients.  Medical professionals do not study patient care throughout their entire lifetime only to be muzzled by politicians in Harrisburg. 

Legislators want to force medical professionals to stick to a script written by politicians, even when it conflicts with evidence-based, medically accurate information. If doctors refuse to mislead or withhold information from their patients, they could be hit with fines, the loss of their licenses to practice and even imprisonment.  These bills are dangerous and we need to protect our patients and medical professionals now!

Some examples of these incursions into the provider-patient relationship include:

--A Florida law, since thrown out by the courts after a long battle, prohibited practitioners from inquiring about and discussing safe storage of firearms where children live;

--Twenty-nine states dictate what information a patient seeking abortion care should be given, including 5 that require medical professionals to inaccurately assert a link between abortion and an increased risk of breast cancer and 6 that require medically inaccurate information that a medication abortion can be safely stopped after the woman takes the first dose of pills;

--Legislatures in Montana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Pennsylvania have all voted to limit health providers’ ability to discuss the chemicals involved in natural gas fracking with their patients who might be harmed by them; 

--Legislation currently under consideration in Alabama, New Hampshire, Arizona, Texas and Utah would all punish doctors for providing best practice, evidence-based, age appropriate gender affirming care to pediatric patients; and,

--A bill introduced in this very body would levy fines against and threaten the licenses of doctors who attempt to encourage vaccine-hesitant parents to inoculate their children in accordance with CDC guidelines.

This legislation would protect the doctor-patient relationship from government interference, preventing the Commonwealth and all political subdivisions from requiring a health care practitioner to provide information that is not medically accurate and medically appropriate for the patient. This legislation would ensure that doctors would not be forced to provide a medical service that is not evidence-based and patient-appropriate, and could not be barred from sharing medically accurate information with their patients.