by Staff Report CTNewsJunkie
HARTFORD, CT — Attorney General William Tong has joined a coalition of 19 other attorneys general in urging the American Medical Association (AMA) to take stronger action to protect health care providers from potentially dangerous medical board certification requirements.
Requiring abortion and gender-affirming care providers to travel to states that restrict those forms of care in order to get board-certified puts them in legal and physical risk, Tong argued in testimony submitted to the AMA.
“The American Medical Association needs to be clear-eyed about the serious threat that doctors face in certain states today,” Tong said in a news release. “Connecticut has taken strong, proactive steps to protect our providers of reproductive and gender-affirming care from radical, out-of-state legal threats. Policies that force doctors to travel to these states undermine those protections and inflict needless risk.”
The coalition of attorneys general also warned that mandating in-person testing in states that have aggressively criminalized or penalized reproductive and gender-affirming health care endangers providers and threatens access to essential care nationwide.
Earlier this year, AMA adopted a policy encouraging medical boards to provide alternative testing options in states with restrictions, but the attorneys general argue that does not go far enough to protect examinees. Instead, the coalition seeks more concrete steps to protect candidates, the news release said.
Recommendations include: Relocating testing sites to non-restrictive states; shifting to remote testing to eliminate the need for travel to hostile environments; or granting individual exemptions from in-person exams in restrictive states for those facing heightened legal or physical risks.
Tong and the coalition warn that mandating in-person board certification testing in states that penalize these forms of health care could have far-reaching and harmful consequences.
Ensuring the safety of health care providers is essential to maintaining access to reproductive and gender-affirming care in states like Connecticut, the attorneys general said, and failure to act could “exacerbate the national health care crisis.”
Joining Tong in submitting testimony, which was led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell and California Attorney General Rob Bonta, are the attorneys general of Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia.