Hundreds of Georgia healthcare workers are losing their professional licenses due to a problem created by a new immigration law in the state.
The law requires everyone – no matter where they were born – to prove their citizenship or legal residence in order to renew their license to practice.
With too few government employees to handle the extra paperwork, licenses for doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other health professionals are being phased out.
Lisa Durden, from the Office of the Secretary of State, says that renewing a license used to be a straightforward process and most applications went through on the fly. Now they crawl.
The passage of the law coincided with budget cuts that reduced office staff by 40 percent.
Kelly Farr, Georgia’s assistant secretary of state, says 600 nurses alone fell through the cracks. “There’s nothing more frustrating than getting that call from the distraught nurse who knows she’s being slowed down because we literally don’t have enough people to click the approve button,” Farr said.
While the State Secretariat handles the licensing of nurses, pharmacists, and veterinarians, the Georgia Medical Association handles the licensing of physicians, physician assistants, and even acupuncturists. There is the same story.
Director LaSharn Hughes says she sent out 41,000 notification letters last Thursday. “And on Monday we had a fax machine burned,” Hughes said. “We didn’t have the staff. We didn’t have the equipment.”
Phones go unanswered. The paperwork is piling up. And processing delays, coupled with confusion over the new rules, mean many expired licenses.
Hughes estimates that about 1,300 physicians and other health practitioners have lost their legal capacity to work. Some did not submit the required documents. Others are stuck with backlogs of applications that have not yet been processed.
Donald Palmisano Jr., executive director of the Medical Association of Georgia, says the law fixes a problem that never existed — at least not among physicians. “We are not aware of any undocumented immigrants who are doctors,” Palmisano said.
Even DA King, an outspoken activist and critic of illegal immigration who helped draft the law, agrees. King says the law protects Georgia jobs, but even he believes some parts of the legislation need fixing. A bill that addressed some of the bill’s shortcomings died in the last legislative session.
“I’m not only outraged, I’m genuinely disappointed and amazed that our repair bill didn’t get voted on,” King said.
Legislative supporters of the bill did not respond to requests for interviews. Nor did Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal.
For now, state licensing agencies will continue to scour the mail for copies of passports and birth certificates, and then compare them to a list of acceptable documents.
But that’s where the review ends, confirm Kelly Farr and Lisa Durden of the Secretary of State’s office. The law says nothing about whether the documents are genuine. “We really have no way of doing that,” says Durden.
State officials say the new document requirements have not uncovered undocumented immigrants.
Instead, officials say they hope the process itself could deter people in the country from illegally trying to get licenses in the first place.
This story is part of a partnership with NPR, WABE and Kaiser Health News.
Copyright 2012 WABE 90.1
