Week in Review: Professional Purgatory

Picture this: You graduate from medical school, highly trained and ready to care for patients. You’re about to take on the next critical phase of your career, residency—only to be locked out.

Last year, that was the reality for more than 7,000 would-be physicians, a new report from the Goldwater Institute and Beacon Center of Tennessee reveals. The problem is a bottleneck: there are significantly fewer residency slots than medical graduates, leaving thousands of graduates stranded in professional purgatory, their skills unused even as the nation faces mounting healthcare shortages.

But there is a solution: allowing medical school graduates to practice as Associate Physicians under the supervision of a licensed physician. Indeed, by integrating these highly trained professionals into clinical settings, states can alleviate physician shortages, expand access to care, and prevent the unnecessary waste of medical talent.

Read the report here.

Life-Changing Victory

It’s just the latest life-changing victory for patients with rare and ultra-rare diseases.

The Goldwater Institute this month enacted our Right to Try for Individualized Treatments in Tennessee—the eighth state to pass this law. It’s a nonpartisan reform that ensures patients suffering from severely debilitating or life-threatening illnesses can access innovative, individualized treatments that are tailor-made for each patient based on their DNA, without first begging the federal government for permission.

Goldwater intends to continue taking this nonpartisan movement to put patients first nationwide—enacting this Right to Try expansion from coast to coast until it is the law of the land.

Innovation is on its way, and we’re not done yet—not by a long shot.

Read more here.

Forced to Fund Politics?

No one should be forced to support speech they don’t agree with just to do their job.

Unfortunately, the Oregon State Bar Association didn’t get the memo. So, we sued them for violating the First Amendment—and now we’re asking the U.S. Supreme Court to protect a conservative attorney’s freedoms.

Bar officials violated Oregon lawyer and retired Army Lt. Col. Daniel Crowe’s rights when the bar endorsed controversial political statements in a magazine funded by mandatory members’ dues. It’s not just Oregon—dozens of states force lawyers to join their state’s privately run bar associations. We’re fighting this injustice across the country, because someone else’s politics shouldn’t get in the way of your right to earn a living.

Read more here.