http://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article145065349.html
N.C. considering a surgery bill that Kentucky regrets passing
As a professor of ophthalmology and a teacher of eye surgeons, I implore North Carolina not to make the mistake my Kentucky made six years ago, blindly rushing into law a bill that let non-surgeons operate on people’s eyes – a move legislators later regretted, and which Kentucky’s citizens opposed four-to-one.
The N.C. General Assembly is considering two misguided proposals, House Bill 36 and Senate Bill 342, that would let optometrists – who are not medical doctors and have little or no surgical training – perform hundreds of kinds of eye surgery with scalpels and lasers. Such a move would threaten patient safety across North Carolina while raising the cost of health care for everyone.
HB 36 and SB 342 remove the current law’s requirement of a medical license to perform eye surgery and would prevent the North Carolina Medical Board from determining the standards of medical education and surgical training. These bills cast aside vital safety protections for patients across North Carolina.
In Kentucky, as in North Carolina, optometrists cite “access to care” as a justification to let them go beyond their proper scope of practice. But access claims have been vastly overstated in both states. An optometrist in Kernersville, N.C., recently claimed that her patients must travel to neighboring Winston-Salem (10 miles) or Greensboro (17 miles) to see an ophthalmologist, as if that were untenable. Meanwhile, there’s an ophthalmology office only a mile and a half away.