Pharmacy bill nothing more than bad medicine
Pharmacists, like all other Americans, have a right to their own personal views, but they shouldn’t have the right to interject their views into a health-care decision made between a doctor and a patient.
A bill called the Pharmacists Freedom of Conscience Act now in the General Assembly would allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions that go against their principles and would protect those pharmacists from any reprisals by their employers. Further, the bill allows pharmacists to post prominent signs telling customers that they have the right to reject prescriptions based on principle.
This bill and similar ones that have appeared in other states are aimed at decreasing access to items such as birth control pills and morning-after pills.
There is very little evidence to suggest pharmacists need such protection. An official with the Tennessee Board of Pharmacy says of millions of prescriptions, Tennessee has had only a handful of complaints about pharmacists refusing to fill them and that none of those were for reasons regarding principle. Drug stores can usually handle such matters with their own internal policies.
But a law that says a druggist can reject a legal prescription disserves the patient and the doctor who wrote it. And in rural areas where competition is limited, one pharmacist’s refusal to fill a prescription could be tantamount to denying the drug altogether.
The more difficult lawmakers can make it for patients to get birth control, the more they can assert their own sense of morals on the market place. That’s not a legislator’s job. This bill is bad medicine.