My Comments
I recently got an email from the president of our state’s midwifery organization describing a combined years-long effort by CALM and two consumer organizations to find a State legislator willing and able to carry a much-needed bill to undo the damage done by a 2013 amendment to the LMPA that was anti-midwife and anti-childbearing women and {not kidding!} sponsored by American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG).
In simple terms, CALM representatives faced an utter impossibility, as 100% of the Democratic legislators refused even to consider carrying a bill that might be opposed by the state’s chapter of the AMA. Bad as that is, the explanation is ten times worse!
A line in a letter about the CMA (state chapter of the AMA) keeps ringing in my head. It revealed that 100% of our Democratic legislator sold out to the AMA/CMA for the paltry sum of $6 million bucks.
This denies Californians — every man, woman, and child in the state — independent access to high-quality preventative healthcare services that would otherwise be provided by the ten different categories of professional healthcare practitioners that the AMA’s Scope of Practice Partnership. According SOPP has been able to — nurse-practitioners, nurse on the AMA’s “victory” majority female list.
This battlefield is littered with the bodies of patients who could not get the type of preventative, health education, and health-enhancing care most suited to their needs, and so their situation continued to devolve until they needed (but often could not afford) very expensive drugs and/or surgery.
Then the taxpayers of California got to reimburse the $150,000 hospital bill and pay for a drug regime that costs $1,700 every month, and disability payment because this unfortunate soul (and the many thousands like him or her every year!) is no longer able to work. Just imagine how quickly the MediCal budget blew through a mere $6 million and yet our “Dear Leaders” (i.e. state legislatures) sold out for a stinking 6 mil.
“The doctor must be enabled to get his money from small fees received from a much larger number of patients cared for under time-saving and strength-conserving conditions;
… he must do his work at the minimum expense to himself, and he must not be asked to do any work for which he is not paid the stipulated fee. This means … doctors must be relieved of all work that can be done by others — nurses, social workers, and midwives.” [1922-A; ZieglerMD, p. 412]
“The nurses should be trained to do all the antepartum and postpartum work, from both the doctors’ and nurses’ standpoint, with the doctors always available as consultants when things go wrong;
and the midwives should be trained to do the work of the so called “practical nurses,” acting as assistants to the regular nurses and under their immediate direction and supervision, and to act as assistant-attendants upon women in labor—conducting the labor during the waiting period or until the doctor arrives, and assisting him (not the mother!) during the delivery.” [1922-A; ZieglerMD
“In this plan the work of the doctors would be limited to the delivery of patients, consulting with the nurses, and to the making of complete physical and obstetrical examinations … [1922-A; ZieglerMD, p. 413]
Note-2-self for follow-up material:
MBC Oct 05, 1993 Del Junco’s task force on state access healthcare
Ololade’s Hx of the AMA
The Impossible Journey of Abrham Flexner – 2008Story of how nurse-midwives were eliminated from virtually all American hospitals
