The criminalization of medicine fails New Hampshire's physicians and patients
"While health care and the practice of medicine is not — and should not be — political, tactics that seek to criminalize medical care and aspects of the physician-patient relationship stem from shifting political headwinds." (Getty Images)
Each year, a number of bills aim to legislate medicine. These are attempts by lawmakers to regulate the treatment relationship between physicians and their patients, or to determine when treatments can and cannot be delivered. This is nothing new, but a concerning trend has emerged recently in New Hampshire: Some bills go beyond an attempt to legislate medicine by including provisions that also criminalize medicine.
These tactics include language within bills that impose criminal or civil penalties for physicians who do not comply with specific mandates. This year, House Bill 10, House Bill 232, and House Bill 377 each include provisions that would impose penalties on physicians.
While health care and the practice of medicine is not — and should not be — political, tactics that seek to criminalize medical care and aspects of the physician-patient relationship stem from shifting political headwinds. Criminalizing medicine distracts and shifts the focus away from the real issues. Facets of medical practice that are seen as hot-button issues are likely to garner debates, both scientific and ideological. Legislating and criminalizing medicine, though, will have a ripple effect that might be felt throughout the health care community in numerous ways.
Criminalizing medicine is an irresponsible and inappropriate way to control and respond to these issues.
As physicians, we dedicate our lives and our careers to our patients, typically spending over a decade in training. This includes four years of undergraduate education, four years of medical school, three to eight years of residency training (depending on the medical specialty), and potentially one to three years of subspecialty fellowship training. This training provides us with the medical knowledge necessary to treat the unique health care challenges of each of our patients. Legislating and criminalizing medicine in New Hampshire, however, would mean that our physicians would be practicing medicine with one hand tied behind their back. This would then increase the likelihood that a patient's health care needs might not be adequately addressed.
Such bills, even when well-meaning, offer a reductive and punitive approach to health care. Treating the health care needs of vulnerable populations requires physicians to combine evidence-based principals, experience, training, and patient preferences to provide individualized medical care for each of our patients. Health care decisions are not made in a vacuum, and bills that criminalize medicine compromise our ability to make these vital treatment decisions.
Bills that criminalize medical care could set a dangerous precedent and have a 'chilling effect,' creating barriers to providing high quality medical care for New Hampshire's physicians. In other states that have criminalized elements of medical practice, physicians may hesitate to provide care in emergencies due to fear of criminal penalties. This has led to patient deaths that otherwise may have been avoidable. As medical professionals, we need to be entrusted to provide the right care at the right time for patients who need it.
While Granite Staters already are finding medical care to be hard to come by, criminalizing medicine would make it more difficult to attract and retain physicians and other medical professionals to New Hampshire. This would in turn make it more difficult for patients to get appointments for primary care and specialist care. Bills that remove physician autonomy to care for our patients and penalize them for using their skills and training will have the unintended consequence of pushing physicians out of the state and exacerbating our shortage of physicians — especially in the most rural areas of the state.
Criminalizing the practice of medicine would not just fail our state's physicians, but it would also fail all of our patients. This would set a dangerous precedent in New Hampshire and put the government in the middle of the relationship between physicians and their patients.
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