Idaho keeps putting doctors through the wringer. When will we get the message? | Opinion

One of the saddest pieces of last week’s news was the terrible treatment of Dr. Rachel Thomas, an emergency room physician at St. Luke’s.

She has treated patients for many years at St. Luke’s. And she has provided free medical care in Haiti, as Sally Krutzig reported last week.

But because of the necessary treatment she provided to a patient whose life was in danger — who, as bad luck would have it, turned out to be the grandson of one of Ammon Bundy’s close allies — Thomas has been harassed, doxxed and threatened.

Coming to testify in court against Bundy and his co-defendants, who have refused to defend themselves and so have already been found liable for defamation, led Thomas’ daughter to worry about her safety.

“I’m worried that you’re going to get hurt,” her daughter told her when she came to testify in court, Krutzig reported.

What a sad commentary on the social climate of Idaho.

And so she testified in court that she is leaving the state to practice elsewhere for the time being. We hope the next place Thomas practices shows her proper respect and gratitude, the kind Idaho should have shown her.

We commend her for her courage to testify, and for her efforts to save the health and lives of Idahoans.

We should take this moment to think hard about how physicians are being treated here, if for no other reason than the selfish one: We desperately need them.

Idaho has long been a state with a rather severe physician shortage. A 2021 report found that, despite robust growth in the physician population since 2014, Idaho still had about a third fewer doctors per capita than the nation at large.

Throughout the years before the pandemic, Idaho had worked hard to expand medical residency programs to fix this problem.

But since the pandemic, doctors have been hit on all sides — from extremists like Bundy, who attacked efforts to bring the pandemic under control to the Republican-dominated Idaho Legislature, which has increasingly targeted doctors with criminal penalties for doing their jobs.

This is a state where saving a child’s life can leave you in fear for your family’s safety.

A state where, if you run a hospital, you have to learn that “DOTR” stands for “Day of the Rope,” the day when white supremacists kill off race traitors in the neo-nazi novel “The Turner Diaries.”

A state where, if you are an OB/GYN who discovers your patient’s fetus has a terminal abnormality that could eventually kill your patient too, you have to send her out of state for fear that you’ll go to prison if you treat her.

A state where, if you have been treating transgender children in close consultation with their parents according to accepted standards of care, you have to explain to your patients that you have to terminate their treatment or face up to a decade in prison.

We’ve got to fix this. Because if there’s one certainty in life, it’s this: Eventually, you’ll need a doctor.

If Idaho continues down the course it’s on now, you’ll look around when that day comes and wonder where they all went.

This story was originally published July 21, 2023 at 4:00 AM.