Legislative Update – March 26, 2021

AI-generated transcript below

[00:01]
Good morning and welcome to the Week for Legislative Report. Things have been active in Tallahassee this past week, but nothing is as vital to physicians as the Covid liability bill. By the time that you’re looking at this, that bill should be on Governor DeSantis’s desk. This bill will protect those physicians who did the best they could during the pandemic to keep their patients safe and to keep themselves safe. If you followed the CDC guidelines, if you substantially complied with those guidelines and those put forth by Governor DeSantis, you should be almost totally immune from civil liability from your patients and your staff.

[00:39]
This is a great way of rewarding those physicians who put themselves into harm’s way in order to protect our patients. We thank you and this is our way of doing it. This is a huge victory for physicians. Also this week, physician assistants try to expand their scope of practice, and while they did pass a committee in both the House and the Senate, the bill has been watered down somewhat. No longer are they seeking autonomous practice, but they are seeking some relief from the minimum or maximum of four supervisors per physician.

[01:15]
They also would like the authority to sign death certificates and things of that nature. But again, the number of locations in which you can have peace is not going to go up. Even if this bill does pass and we are looking forward, this is a good compromise, even if it does pass. But as of now, we are still opposing it and it has a couple more committees to go in, both the House and the Senate. With regard to the ologist bill, which is our expansion of the time law, the truth in medical education, we’ve gotten that bill through one committee in the Senate and we hope to have it up next week in the House.

[01:52]
This bill would make for mandatory penalties for those who misrepresent themselves, either with regard to their specialty or the license under which they’re practicing. Put some teeth into the law that we first passed in 2006. One bill that we keep hearing about from our members is the apparent expansion of practice, what they would like to be able to do is practice autonomously, not only in primary care, but also in specialty medicine. That bill, fortunately, has been stalled and has not yet been heard in either the House or the Senate.

[02:26]
At this point, we’re hoping that that continues. And honestly, if it does not if it’s not heard in either the House or Senate next week, its chances of passage go way, way down. That’s it for this week, ending on March twenty six, twenty twenty one, we thank you for your time and attention as always. If you have any questions, feel free to give me a line nulandlaw@aol.com. Thank you.

[02:52]
And we’ll see you next week.

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