This got a reaction
Here’s the rub. In the old days, local news got very interested when the legislature, and our local representatives were messing with us down in the marble halls of the State Capitol.
Here in Moscow, Idaho, home of the flagship University for the state, THE University of Idaho (Go Vandals!) those days are gone. Our local paper no longer questions our representatives. And our representatives no longer talk to us. So, if the shiv is coming to our backside, we have little warning in the chow line.
The U of I has long been the home for the first-year medical students of the WAMI->WWAMI program. In 1972 Idaho joined with Washington, Alaska, Montana, and later Wyoming to form a consortium to train MD’s.
Back when it meant a couple professors and ten first year students, it didn’t mean a lot of cash for the local economy. But the program has grown. There are now 40 first year students, and that many second-year students are in town for another six months. And the well-paid faculty numbers have grown. And many graduates have returned to Idaho. I’m one.
So why would one of our local elected representatives be working to move this cash cow elsewhere?
Brandon Mitchell has served this district for five years. He lives here. He claims to be a good friend of the Director of the Idaho WWAMI program. But he has consistently voted to dump WWAMI.
His first effort was back in 2021 when he supported the “No Public Funds For Abortion Act”. This modest bill prohibited any entity getting Idaho taxpayer dollars from, among other things, “Provide training to provide for abortions.”
So, the University of Washington, whom we have this WWAMI deal with must comply with Idaho law if they want to keep getting Idaho dollars and students.
Here’s the rub. And it’s a rub you should all know. It comes down to definitions. How do you define “abortion”?
This “Act” says: “the act of using or prescribing any instrument, medicine, drug, or any other substance, device, or means with the intent to terminate the clinically diagnosable pregnancy of a woman with knowledge that the termination by those means will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of the unborn child.”
That might make sense to you but consider this. Under that definition, I should be in an Idaho prison.
There are some babies who are alive in the shelter of their mother’s wombs but will die upon birth. The doctor who delivers that baby, under current Idaho law is a felon, will lose their license. And Idaho required the University of Washington to not train our students how to care for these women.
Brandon Mitchell cosponsored this law. And he supports the current bills in the Idaho legislature to cut our affiliation with the University of Washington.
Honestly, I wouldn’t doubt the UW cares much. They state they regret the divorce. But why? Who wants a radical legislature telling them how to train physicians. According to many evaluators, WWAMI is the preeminent primary care program in the country. Why not build on the best?
And why send these dollars away from your local community to Utah, or BYU, or the private, for-profit medical school in Meridian?
These are decent questions our local paper should be asking of our elected representatives.
The U of I is also deflecting on these questions. They sound like a teenager explaining away their parents’ acrimonious divorce.
The U of I spends our taxpayer dollars to have a lobbyist, Brandon Mitchell’s predecessor, Caroline Nilsson Troy, in the Capitol. And we elect these clowns who want to shiv us in the chow line.
Why doesn’t the local paper cover this?
Do we even care?
I do. Don’t stab me in the back.
Here’s my letter to the editor responding to the “reaction”:
I appreciate Dan Schoenberg’s interest in the future of medical education in Idaho. And I must apologize, he is right, I did exaggerate. For I was anticipating WWAMI would get the axe. Instead, we got the cudgel.
When my column written on March 26th, Mitchell had voted for the original HB 368 that cut WWAMI. The Senate amended it. But there had been plenty of WWAMI attacks in the session. We’ll see how it turns out.
But Dan did not address the real question I posed in my column. Representative Mitchell supported and sponsored in 2021 the “No Public Funds for Abortion” bill that defined abortion in a way that makes caring for women with problem pregnancies illegal.
This is the real issue.
Do we wonder why doctors are leaving Idaho?
Should we wonder why quality medical schools don’t find our association worth the effort?
Caring for pregnant women is complex, fraught, and delicate. The Idaho legislature does not have the wisdom or compassion to legislate how this should be done. No legislature does. Stay out of the discussion. It is between a family and their medical providers.
But Representative Mitchell, who Dan Schoenberg seems to speak for seems to think this is beside the point.
I don’t. It’s very important to me. I wish they felt the same.
I would love to have further conversations with Dan or Rep. Mitchell if they chose. This needs attention.