Like many states, Montana faces a significant healthcare worker deficit. Several bills on the current state legislative docket address multiple factors contributing to this shortage. Although the measures aim to improve care in the Treasure State, they also provide ideas for other regions confronting similar circumstances.
Reversing Regulatory Capture
Although healthcare regulations purportedly exist to protect patients, many actually exist to protect business interests. Regulatory capture is when powerful businesses influence their industry’s regulatory agency, pushing it to enact regulations that benefit them. Infamous examples concern licensing requirements for manure-spreading, fortune-telling, flower-arranging, and hair-braiding. These types of rules are encouraged by incumbent businesses with agency connections in order to create roadblocks for newcomers.
This frequently happens in health care, since it is perceived as needing particular oversight and regulation. If passed, the current bills will overturn several protectionist policies that are harming patients, allowing competent professionals to more easily assist those who need them.
Community Health Worker Recognition
Supportive care costs less than major medical treatment in time, money, and suffering. Community health workers assist people in accessing this care, aiding with tasks such as paperwork and transportation arrangements. This early intervention can prevent clients from sliding into worse circumstances, eliminating the need for the more expensive parts of the healthcare system. However, present law does not really treat them as healthcare professionals.
Montana’s HB 850 legally recognizes the community health worker title, rendering these specialists legally eligible for reimbursements now often reserved for more expensive members of the healthcare community. This constitutes a huge step in the direction of true healthcare freedom, enabling patients, workers, and sponsors to make arrangements agreeable to all.
Interstate Licensure
Multiple current bills increase interstate license recognition. This allows relocating practitioners to quickly begin working in the state without incurring extra costs. Basic requirements for healthcare workers are usually similar across the country, and some are even identical. Yet, state associations often object to recognizing licenses from workers in other states, insisting they do so out of concern for patient safety.
Calling this argument into question, areas that refuse out-of-state licenses sometimes allow incompetent local practitioners to continue operating. New York, which suffers from severe healthcare employee shortages, claims it restricts out-of-state practitioners to safeguard patients. However, it regularly enables local workers to make serious errors and even commit violent crimes. Montana is taking the opposite approach, encouraging the best providers from all over the country to practice there.
Scope Of Practice And Reimbursement
Other bills tackle a slew of restrictions related to scope of practice. Cutting the protectionist tape allows professionals to perform more duties for which they are qualified, freeing up others to focus on their specialized skill set.
Simultaneously, other bills allow the practitioners to be billed and paid based on their work, instead of solely on title. For example, physical therapists and physician’s assistants are not currently considered “treating physicians” under worker’s compensation laws, a situation that SB 109 and HB 143 will remedy. Again, this saves time and money, as well as letting physicians serve where they are specifically needed.
Montana is improving its healthcare system for both patients and conscientious providers. It has long served as an example of how to cut red healthcare tape, and 2025 promises a continuation of this trajectory.