California Medical Association wards off additional oversight

Kaiser Health News reported on California Medical Association's (CMA) response to some proposed legislation to raise physician licensing fees and to give non-physicians greater oversight of the medical board, whose mission is to "protect health care consumers." Presumably because of CMA's lobbying efforts, the increase in licensing fees was reduced to about a fifth of the original proposal, and non-physicians were not given greater oversight of the medical board. The medical board relies on licensing fees, and is reported to be "teetering on insolvency."

A bigger problem from the patient perspective is that in the fiscal year 2019 to 2020, cases "took an average of 548 days from start to end." Investigations taking a year and a half seems unreasonably long, and it would be interesting to hear a response from the industry. The medical board investigated about 20% of the 10,868 complaints that it received in the same time period, which also sounds rather low. Unredacted public disclosure of those complaints that were not investigated would certainly be problematic, so it would be good to have an independent review of those complaints to see if the board should be investigating many more complaints. Kaiser Health News additionally reported that "Patients and their families who have testified at legislative hearings describe an unresponsive and uncommunicative board that usually allows doctors accused of negligence or malpractice to continue to practice."

From the looks of it, it seems that the CMA has acted against patient interests. Of course, the CMA was organized to advocate for physician interests, not patient interests. The true issue might be the strength of CMA's political reach.