Kernan Manion: Attacking a doctor’s due process
The Dec. 24 news article “Program to help troubled doctors” on proposed legislation pertaining to the N.C. Medical Board’s affiliated Physicians Health Program and the state auditor’s findings was incomplete. If there had been nothing seriously wrong with operational procedures, why would both the medical board and the health program go through so much effort to change them? And why go behind the scenes to change the very laws protecting due process that they were both found to be breaking?
Your article dismissed the relevance of the auditor’s finding that over a thousand N.C. physicians were (and still are) subjected to potentially unwarranted and biased psychiatric evaluations by a nonneutral state-sanctioned agency (on “anonymous complaints” and unsourced “existence of information”) and then, on the basis of their secretive findings not even obtainable by physicians or their counsel, are ordered to preselected “preferred” out-of-state facilities.
These physicians are completely deprived of their due process rights to fair evaluation and the right to concurrently defend themselves and correct their records. Once ensnared in this nightmare, falsely assessed physicians can plan on laying out $100,000 minimum simply to clear their names.
This Soviet-style abuse of psychiatric evaluation is deeply disturbing. As a result, over a thousand physicians who have been deprived of their explicitly guaranteed due process rights have been subjected to a concealed and potentially erroneous diagnosis and then further deprived of any opportunity to challenge the findings – even being prevented from seeing their NCPHP report at all! And then these physicians (and physician assistants and nurse practitioners who fall under the jurisdiction of NCPHP) have been ordered to submit to exorbitantly costly “treatment” at inherently biased institutions out-of-state for diagnoses they didn’t have in the first place.
Further, the article failed to note that the proposed legislation guts any reference to requisite due process from the existing law and does nothing to ensure the integrity and transparency of either NCMB or NCPHP’s practices. It even asks the legislature to grant it autonomous powers to write its own rules heretofore!
The issue is not whether some physicians need confidential assessment and treatment for addiction and mental illness. As in any profession, some do. Rather, it is that physicians so assessed by the state medical board and its affiliated state-sanctioned agency NCPHP must be assured that they will receive an honest, transparent and fully accountable evaluation; that the agency charged with their evaluation will adhere to established standards of medical professionalism and requisite due process; and that they will receive appropriate, unbiased and nonpunitive treatment. And they must have the ability to contest any inaccuracy in their record that, uncorrected, could destroy them professionally.
Clearly, the proposed legislation, presented as it has been in behind-the-scenes maneuvering by one or both of the two affected state agencies, is deeply flawed and overtly dangerous – not only to physicians and their patients but to all licensed professionals.
Kernan Manion, M.D.
Wilmington
The length limit was waived to permit a fuller response to the article.
This story was originally published January 5, 2015 at 4:23 PM with the headline "Kernan Manion: Attacking a doctor’s due process."