Patients appreciate their doctors, but it is not often they rise up for them.
In this age, less often do they pass legislation to reform state licensing enforcement.

This remarkable story occurred in a small town in upstate NY, a state which has a reputation of particularly hard licensing enforcement. Once the citizens began to fight, several other groups of patients and towns with lost doctors joined them, and went to the legislature.

A local physician in Herkimer, NY came under investigation by the licensure medical regulation office, and was stopped from practicing. His town did not believe the charges, and had former state troopers conduct their own investigation. It found not evidence to condemn him, but to exonerate him. But the state laws did not allow new evidence to be considered. The County Legislature appointed the physician County Health Director, in spite of losing his license. Maine granted him a license criticizing New York's process.

The town took their fight to the legislature in an effort to change the laws. Healthlobby.com helped, and the site documents the story. Along the way they found similar communities as well as professional associations with the same worries. In one key case the standard of cross examination did not meet civil or criminal standards. In another, evidence favorable to the physician was suppressed Several doctors were punished for prescribing a treatment for Lyme disease beyond three weeks, when the treatment length is not established And doctors can not only lose their license, but spend hundreds of thousands of dollars defending themselves, costs not covered by insurance.

The patients were upset not only that they lost their doctors, but that physicians, in some twilight zone scenario, do not have due process. This is not only bad for doctors, but how can the system identify the problems and avoid punishing the innocent? In this state, as in others, it did not, and patients health as well as doctors lives suffered.

When the debate reached the legislature in January 2002, hundreds of patients turned out to support or testify for a reform introducing due process into the system for the doctors. Thousands of other wrote letters of support. Bill A.4274b passed the state Assembly, and S.4148a passed the Senate, unanimously. It is a remarkable achievement.

Now they wait for it to go to the Governor, and are looking for more support in the next stage of their battle. This is what tort reform should be, not lawyers pitting physicians against patients in court, but activist patients and activist doctors making the healthcare system work.