Kansas Allows Physicians To Practice Across State Lines

A “mega-bill” containing several provisions related to licensure of medical professionals survived a rules dispute to pass just before the Kansas Legislature adjourned early Monday morning.

Unless Gov. Sam Brownback vetoes the bill, the conference committee report combined in House Bill 2615 will require acupuncturists to be licensed, enter Kansas into a compact that will license physicians to practice across state lines and expand the authority of nurse midwives.

The bill also will create a licensed master’s addictions counselor category within behavioral health statutes and allow physicians and dentists to fulfill continuing education requirements by providing charity care to Kansans who can’t afford it.

Several parts of the bill had persistent champions in the House.

Rep. Dan Hawkins, a Republican from Wichita who chairs the House Health and Human Services Committee, pushed for the charity care provision as a means of providing some access to health care for low-income Kansans in the absence of Medicaid expansion.

Rep. Jim Kelly, a Republican from Independence, advocated for the interstate licensure compact to help a clinic in his district transition to using physicians from a Bartlesville, Okla., hospital after the local hospital closed.

“It was extremely exciting to me, particularly with the rollercoaster that it rode on for several days there,” Kelly said Monday afternoon. “I was concerned that it wasn’t going make it back out. But when it did and it passed by a large margin, I was extremely happy.”

Kelly said joining the licensing compact also would increase telemedicine in Kansas and could be the most important piece of health legislation to come out of the 2016 session.

It almost didn’t pass, as the bill ran into a late roadblock because of an anti-abortion provision added to the midwives section while the bill was in conference committee.

Anti-abortion lobbying groups wanted the language to assure them nothing in the bill would allow midwives to perform abortions or dispense abortion drugs. But neither chamber had vetted the language, so adding it to the conference committee report would violate bill-bundling rules the House approved a year earlier.

Rep. John Rubin, a Republican from Shawnee who spearheaded the rules, objected on the House floor and the House voted to send the bill back to conference committee.

Sen. Mary Pilcher-Cook, a Republican from Shawnee, insisted on the anti-abortion language, telling the Wichita Eagle that “the protection of human life” superseded any legislative rules.

Rubin said during a Monday afternoon interview that the Kansas Medical Society had told him abortions already were outside the scope of what midwives are allowed to do and the bill would not have altered that. Still, as a vocal opponent of abortion, Rubin said he would have been happy to support the anti-abortion language if it had gone through the proper legislative process rather than being added at the conference committee stage.

“I don’t know that it’s even necessary, but necessary or unnecessary, if you’re going to do it, do it right,” he said. “Do it by the rules.”

Rubin said he met with Hawkins and, in the interest of keeping the legislation alive, agreed not to challenge it based on House rules again while retaining the right to vote against it based on that principle.

When the bill came back to the floor, it passed the Senate 40-0 and the House 115-7. Rubin was among those who voted against it.

“That was an absolute, flagrant, outright, hands-down, no-question-about-it violation of the rules,” he said.

The KHI News Service is an editorially independent initiative of the Kansas Health Institute.