(Cheyenne, WY) – A Senate committee has defeated a bill draft sponsored by Wyoming Rep. Pepper Ottman, R-Riverton, that would have given health care professionals the right not to participate in health care services that violate their conscience.
House Bill 222 – Medical Ethics Defense Act-2 failed in a 3-2 vote in the Senate Labor, Health and Social Services Committee on Feb. 26.
The committee heard testimony that day from Wyoming Department of Health Director Stefan Johansson, who pointed out that the legislation requires his agency to promulgate any rules that would be necessary to implement the bill – but “we do not have rulemaking authority (over) specific health care practitioners or the practice of medicine.”
“That would be problematic, for the Department of Health to promulgate those rules without authority,” he said.
Wyoming Board of Medicine Executive Director Kevin Bohnenblust said his organization “would likely need rule-making authority to be able to enforce any of this” as well.
He also pointed to a portion of the bill that requires the WDH “or any board, certifying agency or licensing agency” to inform a health care professional within 14 days about “any complaint or action to suspend or revoke (their) license, certificate, certification or registration.”
“That is really problematic because although the sponsor of the bill described it as being actions brought because of acts of conscience … the way it’s written, it would be any action brought on licensing,” he explained. “It has no reference to the rest of the bill … So what that’s doing (is) imposing a whole new set of requirements for licensure actions.”
The committee later voted to delete that paragraph from the bill.
Medical students
Wyoming Community College Commission Executive Director Ben Moritz spoke to the impact HB 222 could have on medical students, who may be enrolled in programs that “cover areas that they disagree with.”
Under HB 222, Moritz said those students “could refuse to do (those) pieces of the training,” and as a result, they might receive “a grade reduction” – which “could be seen (as) discriminatory based on this bill.”
Later, Ottman said she sponsored HB 222 to protect medical students who “cannot continue going to school” and health care professionals who “cannot find a job” that accommodates their conscience protections.
“That’s why I ran it,” she said. “We want to protect people and their businesses and their lives and allow them to be who they want to be and run their businesses the way they want to without threat.”
Abortion laws
Wyoming Hospital Association President Eric Boley said the legislation should be refined to specifically cover abortion care, physician-assisted suicide, and gender-affirming care – the items state lawmakers have specifically mentioned as areas of concern for conscience protections.
“Most of our hospitals … don’t do any of these things,” he noted. “(But) we should really define what this bill is all about.”
Powell Physician Dean Bartholomew later disagreed, however, arguing that HB 222 should be more “general” to accommodate “future medical changes and advances” and to avoid having to change the legislation in the future to include additional procedures.
Boley also responded to statistics Ottman shared earlier in the meeting, when she cited a survey in which 73 percent of medical professionals “said that they would stop practicing medicine apart from conscience protections.”
The statistic indicates that a lack of conscience protections could be contributing to “the decline in the population of medical professionals” in Wyoming, Ottman said.
“There’s people out there in our communities that want to be working, that want to fill these positions that we so desperately need,” Ottman said. “This is just one more tool to help us get people back (and) bring very qualified helath care professionals into our state. … It’s time to help the people that want to work and want to be in this profession, but that have certain things that they believe that shouldn’t be in their scope of practice.”
Boley countered, however, that Wyoming is actually “having a hard time recruiting doctors into our state because of existing laws we already have … especially in the (obstetrics) realm.”
“With what’s going on with abortion (laws) and how broad those are, we have doctors that don’t want to come to our state,” he said.
Sexually explicit events
Another legislative proposal that a local lawmaker sponsored this year wasn’t heard in the Wyoming Senate before the cutoff date last week.
Wyoming Rep. Joel Guggenmos, R-Riverton, was the main sponsor on House Bill 134, which would have prohibited state agencies, cities, towns, counties, political subdivisions, community colleges, and school districts from using state or federal funds, personnel, facilities or equipment to sponsor or contribute to sexually explicit events, including drag queen events.