This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 13th,

2023, and Caleb Brown.

Many professionals in medicine simply don't have the ability to do many of the things they're perfectly qualified to do.

It's largely overt licensing and scope of practice.

Cato's Jeff Singer details the ways in which pharmacists ought to be allowed to step up to deliver additional care for the people who need it.

Where are some opportunities for other medical professionals trained and ready to take up certain tasks, where are those opportunities?

There are actually a lot of what we doctors call mid-level health care practitioners.

In other words, they haven't gone all the way to get a doctorate in medicine,

but they know a lot about certain aspects of health care delivery and because of licensing laws and

scope of practice battles where the different professions lobby legislators to restrict the scope of practice of mid-level professionals who can compete with doctors,

we haven't been able to take full advantage of the talent these people have and the services these people can offer.

And it's becoming a particularly an acute problem now because we're seeing a worsening shortage of

primary health care practitioners, not just the physicians, but nurse practitioners, physician assistants.

There's a national shortage of primary care and is actually a shortage of multiple medical specialties care.

There's a shortage of a lot of specialists and anybody who's tried to get an

appointment recently with a physician's office

likely knows what I'm talking about because sometimes it could be a wait for months

just for a routine visit. So we have in our midst pharmacists who are actually trained to know more

than just counting the pills in one large bottle and transferring them into a smaller

bottle. These people are experts in the pharmaceuticals, how they interact with other drugs, how they react in different people with

different medical conditions and in fact we we doctors routinely consult

pharmacists sometimes when I'm, as a surgeon, the most common medications I prescribe are antibiotics and pain medications.

...