Key Vote NO on Arizona HB 2446

On behalf of our activist community, I urge you to contact your representative and ask him or her to vote NO on HB 2446. We oppose HB 2446 because it limits the scope of practice for multiple health providers and will unnecessarily keep them from practicing at the top of their license and training.

As we have learned in the years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, our healthcare sector is already stretched thin. HB 2446 would only further limit practitioners’ abilities to treat and care for patients.

Access to good nutrition while in a care setting is imperative to a patient’s ability to regain strength and heal. The Certified Nutrition Specialist™ (CNS) exists to help advanced practitioners – like doctors, advanced practice registered nurses (APRN), physician assistants, and nurse practitioners – to issue orders for appropriate nutrition care for the patients they are already seeing. The CNS isn’t just an intern who spent their downtime reading r/nutrition on Reddit, but someone who is a licensed medical professional already in possession of an advanced degree wishing to add a specialty for nutrition.

HB 2446 punishes these practitioners, who took time to earn a nationally recognized credential, by keeping them from practicing to the full scope of their credentials, education, and training. They could prescribe Ozempic and Wegovy for weight loss but couldn’t talk about changing the amount of vegetables and lean protein a patient should eat for weight loss. It would even prevent your cardiologist from letting you know mixing grapefruit juice and your high blood pressure medications is a bad idea.

We fully support health practitioners being able to practice at the top of their license and training. If a doctor or APRN wants to take time to specialize, the state should not impose an artificial constraint on their ability to practice medicine to the full extent of their training and ability. We wouldn’t tell a Certified Public Accountant that they couldn’t do auditing even though they took time to earn a certification for internal auditing. Why would we do the same in nutrition?

FreedomWorks will count the vote on HB 2446 when calculating our Scorecard for 2024 and reserves the right to score and weigh any related votes. The scorecard is used to determine eligibility for the FreedomFighter Award, which recognizes Members of the House and Senate who consistently vote to support economic freedom and individual liberty.

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