By SHERRY ROBINSON
All She Wrote
© 2025 New Mexico News Services

• • • • • Look around, senators. You’re hurting people.

What is it about healthcare that inspires so much gibberish? On the same day that the president was dispensing unfounded medical advice on Tylenol to pregnant women, state Senate Majority Leader Peter Wirth was spinning a wild yarn about why lawmakers shouldn’t take up medical compacts during the upcoming special session.

The interstate medical licensure compact is an agreement among states to recognize each others’ professional licenses. It allows healthcare workers licensed in one state to work in another that participates in the compact. They would instantly ease New Mexico’s shortage of medical professionals. And for people who now travel outside the state to see specialists that we don’t have, it would be a huge savings in time and money.

Most states participate in the compacts because they make sense. New Mexico belongs only to the compact for nurses, and it works very well. Attempts to approve compacts for doctors and other healthcare workers have failed, as I’ve written before, because of opposition from the powerful New Mexico Trial Lawyers Association.

Now there are two new reasons to join compacts. The federal government is offering $50 billion to rural hospitals to offset effects of the “big beautiful bill,” but applicants in compact states will get preference. Deadline for the initial round of funding is Nov. 5. Waiting until the regular session to debate the compacts risks losing this funding, warns the nonpartisan Think New Mexico, which has championed compacts.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman George Muñoz, who is a businessman and not a lawyer, said pointedly, “If the Legislature chooses to leave $100 million a year on the table, that may be a key issue.” Muñoz, who is from Gallup, knows well the precarious state of rural hospitals.

The other new reason is that one in five service members turn down assignments at New Mexico Air Force bases because medical care is inadequate for that family. The rate of medical rejections here is double the Air Force average. Cannon in Clovis, Holloman in Alamogordo, and Kirtland in Albuquerque are among the top 17 Air Force bases for military rejection.

The governor is ready to have medical compacts on her agenda for the Oct. 1 special session but said the Senate’s leaders are opposed.

By that she means the five Senate Democrats who killed the physician compacts bill this year by amending it to death in the Senate Judiciary Committee: Joseph Cervantes, of Las Cruces; Katy Duhigg, Moe Maestas, Debbie O’Malley, and Mimi Stewart, of Albuquerque; and Peter Wirth, of Santa Fe. They’re all from New Mexico’s biggest cities and don’t know or care what’s happening to rural hospitals.

Senate Majority Leader Wirth, a lawyer, told Source New Mexico he opposed adding medical compacts to the special agenda. “Healthcare policy should not be held hostage to short-term grant deadlines,” Wirth said. “Making permanent changes to professional licensing standards based on temporary funding availability and an ever-changing set of rules coming from the federal government sets a dangerous precedent.”

Wirth added that lawmakers need time before the regular session in January “to examine how interstate compacts would interact with New Mexico’s existing laws and ensure that any changes truly serve the long-term interests of providers and patients.”

Think New Mexico responded: “Lawmakers have had ample time to think through the compacts. New Mexico entered the nurse compact in 2003. Other compacts have been introduced repeatedly over multiple years. Seven of the ten compacts passed unanimously through the House in 2025. In March, the (physician) compact was debated at length in the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

Wirth is dissembling. Pretending to be concerned and raising false issues, he will keep compacts out of the special session and buy time for the trial lawyers to mount a more elaborate attack during the regular session.

The governor has called them on it. In a news conference, she said: “I worry there are so many trial lawyer leaders in the Senate that it gets caught there. I understand that they will tell you their perspective is patient safety, but if you have no doctors here and nobody can get in, I don’t see how you make the argument that you’re leaning in to patient safety.”

Increasingly alone, Wirth and the trial lawyers’ Senate minions face a loud and growing clamor for compacts, medical malpractice reform and meaningful measures to retain and recruit doctors and other healthcare professionals.

Look around, senators. You’re hurting people.