BOISE, Idaho — Imagine, said Idaho Sen. Ron Taylor, D-Hailey, that you’ve gone to the hospital for a blood transfusion, and a nurse declines to assist with the procedure because he believes that divine intervention, not medical treatment, should help your condition.

Maybe you’re a military veteran seeking counseling, Taylor added, and a mental health provider declines to work with you because she opposes war.

These could be some of the effects of a bill moving through the Idaho Legislature, Taylor warned Monday on the Senate floor. The bill, House Bill 59, aims to protect health care workers from “being forced to participate in non-emergency procedures that would violate their sincerely held religious, moral or ethical beliefs,” according to its statement of purpose.

Senators overwhelmingly supported the bill Monday. The House will now have to approve amendments before it heads to Gov. Brad Little’s desk.

Taylor and others opposed to the bill raised the alarm about its vague wording — and argued that such a law could be “catastrophic” for Idahoans, especially in rural areas with already-limited access to health care.

A doctor consults with a patient at St. Luke’s Health System’s internal medicine clinic in 2024. A bill moving through the Idaho Legislature would allow doctors to opt out of procedures that violate their ethical or moral beliefs. Angela Palermo apalermo@idahostatesman.com

Both supporters and opponents of the bill cited the Hippocratic Oath, an oath of ethics typically taken by physicians: “First, do no harm.” But there was a divide over how those words were interpreted.

Sen. Carl Bjerke, R-Coeur d’Alene, the bill’s sponsor, argued that COVID-19 had enforced conformity among medical professionals, who were at times censured for expressing concerns or doubts about the efficacy or safety of the COVID-19 vaccine. “Corporatization” of medicine, he argued, is preventing doctors from giving patients honest advice.

“Don’t you want the doctor to tell you the truth?” he asked senators.

Dr. David Pate, the former CEO and president of St. Luke’s health system, argued that the bill was instead giving priority to health care providers’ individual preferences rather than patient needs. The bill’s title, which refers to defending providers’ medical ethics, “misrepresents the core principles of medical ethics, which are duties and obligations owed by health care providers to patients, not to health care providers,” he said.

“We do not impose our beliefs, our attitudes, our religion on our patients,” Pate told the Idaho Statesman by email.

Idaho doctors leave state over abortion laws

Bjerke argued that the bill could help to address Idaho’s shortage of medical professionals. Nationwide, Idaho has the fewest primary care doctors relative to its population.

“A lot of that reason is that folks left the medical system because of what they saw as corporatization of medical care,” he told senators. He cited testimony from a constituent who is a retired doctor, who served as president of Washington State Medical Association and said there had been a “chilling of speech” among physicians surrounding COVID-19-era public health measures.

But in surveys and interviews, many doctors who have left Idaho in fact cited the state’s anti-abortion laws, which are causing fear, uncertainty and anxiety among physicians who could be charged with a felony for performing an abortion they deem medically necessary. A survey by the Idaho Coalition for Safe Healthcare showed that most of the physicians who considered leaving the state cited the new laws as the main reason.

Opponents also pushed back on the idea that a lack of free speech was driving doctors out of Idaho. They argued that what they viewed as legislative overreach into medicine would further hamstring doctors and nurses by causing confusion about what treatments are permitted and who can provide them. That could include abortions in cases of rape or incest, said Sen. Melissa Wintrow, D-Boise, when a patient could encounter a physician who refuses to perform the procedure despite Idaho law allowing it.

“We’re basically talking out of both sides of our mouth on that,” Wintrow told senators. “Do we either provide the emergency care for the 13-year-old who’s pregnant because they’ve been raped by a father or an uncle or a brother, or do we allow the physician to reject it, and now we put the patient in a terrible position again?”

But without his bill, Bjerke said, Idahoans would be left with a “vending machine medical system” where “you put in a quarter and you push C4 because you think you can get what you want out of any particular medical professional.”

Such a system, he argued, is unrealistic.

“That’s not the case,” Bjerke said. “These people are human. They have their own personal beliefs, they have their levels of expertise. And for us to deny that and to deny that they have the right to feel strongly about the things that they believe strongly, I think we’re going down a path that we don’t need to go down.”

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