HURRICANE Katrina wasn't just about levees that gave way. It revealed plenty of fault lines in the system of providing aid to Americans who desperately need it. The latest display of absurdity: Federally insured doctors and nurses were forbidden from assisting in the Gulf Coast recovery because their federal medical liability doesn't cover them outside their own states.
Huh? Isn't this one nation? As ridiculous as it sounds, it will take an act of Congress so American health-care workers can still have proper medical coverage as they leave one state to help stricken citizens in another.
Thank goodness Michigan Congressman Joe Schwarz, who is a medical doctor, has proposed a bill to permit federally insured medical employees to automatically retain coverage while working in a declared disaster area. Another Republican, Ohio's Rep. Paul Gillmor, co-sponsored the bill.
Hopefully, the fact that Mr. Gillmor is a member of the House health subcommittee will improve chances of passage. The issue was brought to his attention when a health center in his district in Fremont learned it could not send volunteers to Biloxi, Miss., in January.
Plans to treat the volunteer medical workers as temporary federal workers in Mississippi failed when the Health Resources and Services Administration said there would be no federal worker to swear-in and supervise the Fremont volunteers.
That ranks right up there among bureaucratic absurdities. At least the Fremont workers didn't wind up just sitting around along the Gulf Coast for a week, only to go home after doing nothing, as did a team of Iowa volunteers.Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck in the South and sent the health-care system reeling because there were not enough workers or adequate supplies for the desperate situation. The badly damaged and destroyed community clinics then sought assistance from their counterparts in other states. Instead of getting help right away, they got double-talk about other states' nurses and doctors not having federal medical liability that would protect them in other states.
It's ludicrous that federally insured medical workers in one state can't work in another one and still have proper liability coverage. And why in the world would they have to be sworn in again? They were not traveling to another country. They were in America. This was one time when national needs took precedence over states' rights.
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