State legislative issue backgrounders
State policy happens quickly. To make sense of it all, the AAFP has developed backgrounders on trending health policy proposals.
From health care coverage to payment, these legislative issue backgrounders provide key information needed to gain state policy ground.
- Health care coverage
These tools were developed to help drive regulatory change to improve access to affordable health care coverage for all.
- Legal issues
Family medicine is subject to regulatory and legal changes with enormous potential impacts on the specialty. The following tools help address a range of issues, including administrative simplification, liability reform and legal transparency.
- Physician payment
Primary care physicians must be adequately compensated for the services they provide through means that are responsible without imposing excessive administrative complexity.
- Public health and safety
Family physicians are ideally positioned to spearhead the nation's public health efforts. As policymakers seek public health protections and improvements, here are tools to use with legislators and regulators at all levels to provide critical frontline data and perspective on a range of crucial issues.
- Corporal punishment in schools
- Electronic cigarettes
- Environmental health and climate change
- Health equity
- Importance of primary care
- Immunization Information Systems (IIA)
- Immunizations
- LGBTQ+ health
- Mail-in voting
- Marijuana
- Maternal health and mortality
- Medication-assisted treatment
- Obesity
- Prescription drug monitoring programs
- Safe driving and Good Samaritan reporting
- Sex for money and goods
- Stealthing
- Supervised injection sites
- Tobacco
- Women's health
- Scope of practice
Patients are best served by ensuring that many of the services provided by allied health professionals are done only under a physician's supervision, as outlined in these role-specific resources.
- Physician workforce
Primary care physicians are more critical than ever to U.S. health, even as the family medicine workforce pipeline has never been more challenged. Browse our resources that cover the most important issues affecting the primary care workforce.