Health care workers losing their licenses to practice by the Hundreds

The law requires everyone — no matter where they were born — to prove their citizenship or legal residency to renew their professional licenses.
With too few state workers to process the extra paperwork, licenses for doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other health professionals are expiring.

Kelly Farr, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, says 600 nurses alone have fallen through the cracks. “There’s nothing more frustrating than getting that call from the desperate nurse, knowing … she’s being slowed down because we literally don’t have enough people to click the approve button,” Farr said.

While the secretary of state handles licensing of nurses, pharmacists, and veterinarians, Georgia’s medical board is in charge of doctors, physician assistants and even acupuncturists. It’s the same story there.

Director LaSharn Hughes says she sent 41,000 letters of notification out on a recent Thursday. “And by Monday, we’d burned up a fax machine,” Hughes said. “We didn’t have the staff. We didn’t have the equipment.”

Phones go unanswered. Paperwork piles up. And processing delays, coupled with confusion over the new rules, mean lots of expired licenses.

Hughes estimates about 1,300 doctors and other medical practitioners have lost their legal ability to work. Some didn’t submit the required paperwork. Others are stuck in the backlog of applications that haven’t been processed yet.

Donald Palmisano Jr. executive director of the Medical Association of Georgia, says the law fixes a problem that never existed — at least not among doctors. “We’re not aware of any undocumented immigrants that are physicians,” Palmisano said.

Even D.A. King, an outspoken activist and critic of illegal immigration who helped write 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 law’s shortcomings died in the last legislative session.

For now, state licensing offices will keep plowing through the mail containing copies of passports and birth certificates, then checking them against a list of acceptable documents.

State officials say the new document requirements haven’t uncovered any undocumented immigrants.

Instead, officials say they hope the process itself may discourage people in the country illegally from trying to get licenses in the first place.

Read more at http://bossip.com/679876/surprise-that-new-georgia-immigration-law-is-trippin-up-doctors-and-nurses/#Km5Ltxq8Fy2dwdrh.99