Sherry Robinson
All She Wrote

Former Las Cruces Mayor Ken Miyagishima, in declaring his candidacy for governor, did something no other Democrat has been willing to do: he challenged his fellow Democratic candidates to refuse campaign funding from trial lawyers.

Miyagishima stated correctly that New Mexico’s malpractice laws and the spike in litigation and insurance premiums in recent years is driving doctors from the state.

“We are the only state that is losing doctors,” he told the Albuquerque Journal, referring to data from the New Mexico Medical Society, which reported that we lost 248 doctors across the state from 2019 to 2024 while neighboring states added doctors.

Thanks to Democrats and their benefactor, the New Mexico Trial Lawyers Association, changes in malpractice law since 2021 multiplied malpractice lawsuits and spiked court awards and settlement costs.

I’ve previously written about how Dems torpedoed the malpractice reform bill in this year’s legislative session. There’s more.

Think New Mexico had a package of bills to address our healthcare shortages. The bipartisan think tank has a long track record of advancing useful legislation, but this time David faced Goliath. The trial lawyers have deep pockets and matching clout.

One of the most important bills was the bipartisan HB 243 by Rep. Marian Matthews, a moderate Democrat from Albuquerque, and House Minority Leader Gail Armstrong, R-Magdalena. It would have allowed New Mexico to join the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact, an agreement among states to recognize each others’ professional licenses. Forty-three other states have joined.

“It’s the easiest way to have a substantial increase in doctors, Matthews said. “It could provide expertise that’s not even available in New Mexico.”

Companion bills would have done the same for other healthcare professions.

HB 243 passed the House unanimously and then sat in the Senate Judiciary Committee more than a week before being heard. Matthews and Armstrong were pleased that Rick Masters, the compact’s general counsel, came to New Mexico to present before the committee. “They went out of their way to work with us.”

Matthews, herself an attorney, was astounded by what happened next. Sen. Katy Duhigg, D-Albuquerque, spent hours reading every line and paragraph the Senate Judiciary committee wanted stricken. Duhigg made dozens of amendments that transformed the bill.

“We told them if they insist on changing the bill it would be unacceptable to the compact. They did it anyway. It was ugly,” Matthews said.

It should be noted that the law firm of committee Chairman Joseph Cervantes, D- Las Cruces, sues doctors. So does Duhigg’s lawfirm.

The gutted HB 243 died on the Senate calendar. The other compact bills also died.

Why? Because the trial lawyers object to a provision in the compacts that prevents them from suing the interstate compact commissions, which oversee the compacts. “There is no good reason to sue them, but the lawyers object to the idea of shielding anyone from potential lawsuits,” said Fred Nathan, of Think New Mexico.

In the aftermath, Republicans called out Dems for tanking these bills, and the governor agreed with them.

“People die when they can’t get access to healthcare,” she said. She complained that her public safety bills died in the same committees that defeated the healthcare bills, and she chastised the trial lawyers by name.

“Just look at the number of malpractice cases brought in New Mexico,” she said. “Look at the number of law firms coming from out of state to prosecute cases here.”

Duhigg sent her constituents a long letter bragging about her accomplishments during the session but didn’t mention her role in depriving them of doctors.

Meanwhile, I keep hearing from doctors. A surgeon describes colleagues planning to retire early or leave the state. “All of this is lawsuit driven,” she writes. “These are good surgeons! They are kind, thoughtful, skilled. They didn’t go into surgery for money; there are so many easier ways to make money.

“Ours is a stressful field at baseline. Complications hurt us and haunt us, but they are a reality of practicing surgery. As much as we would love to have perfect outcomes, as hard as we work for it, we know that complications will happen. In New Mexico, we are punished for situations we can’t control. And as the number of doctors declines, we get busier and busier, patients have less primary care, and we face uncontrollable emergency situations. It is truly a vicious cycle.”

Candidate Miyagishima worries his name might be an obstacle. If he champions healthcare providers and stands up to the trial lawyers, everybody will know his name.

Sherry Robinson is a longtime New Mexico reporter and editor. She has worked in Grants, Gallup, the Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico Business Weekly and Albuquerque Tribune. She is the author of four books. Her columns won first place in 2024 from New Mexico Press Women.

Victor Davis Hanson

One reason why the public turned on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) was its insistence that roughly 70 percent of the country was stereotyped as victimizers by virtue of their skin color.

In contrast, the other “diverse” 30% were de facto considered the victimized.

In such absurd binaries, the left returned to the old “one-drop” rule of the antebellum South, suggesting that anyone with any nonwhite ancestry was a minority victim.

And once that Marxist-inspired dichotomy was institutionalized, a corollary was established that the self-declared racially oppressed cannot themselves be racist oppressors.

But human nature is universal and transcends race.

One lamentable characteristic of our species is that we are all prone to excess and crudity if not deterred, especially once civilizational restraint is lost.

We are now witnessing examples of what follows when anti-white stereotyping and racism are given a pass — as long as the purveyors can claim their victimhood entitles them to bias.

Recently, WNBA basketball stars Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark got into one of their now-characteristic on-court rivalries. But this time around, Reese mocked Clark as a “White gyal (sic) running from the fade.”

Reese assumes that her status as a Black star grants her immunity from backlash — a privilege unlikely to be extended if the roles were reversed.

Or is her crassness a simple reflection that 60 years after the Civil Rights movement, it is deemed cool or deservedly acceptable to use the word “white” derogatorily?

After all, loose-cannon Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-TX, in one of her accustomed racialist rants, recently went after her party’s big Democratic donors, who raised a record amount of money for Kamala Harris’s short-lived campaign.

Crockett played the race card when claiming that Democratic insiders were already backing the next party nominee as the “safest white boy.”

Her racist irritation is puzzling. After all, two out of the last four Democratic presidential nominees have been African-Americans.

Yet it is certainly easy to see why Crockett, who endlessly spouts off about race in congressional sessions, used the pejorative “white boy.” She knows that there are no repercussions given her race and, to a lesser extent, her gender and left-wing ideology.

Recently, a past 2018 slur resurfaced from another House Democrat, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-MN. She had falsely claimed, “I would say our country should be more fearful of white men across our country because they are actually causing most of the deaths in this country.”

Omar’s stereotyped smear was not only racist but also factually incorrect.

The FBI’s 2018 data on perpetrators of murder, when the race of the offender was known, reveals that 54.9% of the nation’s murderers that year were African-American, who constitute about 13% of the population.

And when the race of the murderer in rare interracial killings was known, blacks were more than twice as likely to murder whites as whites were to kill blacks.

During recent controversies over leaks at the Pentagon, former UN Ambassador Susan Rice, during the Obama administration, injected race by smearing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. She leveled a trifecta race/gender/sexual orientation slur — all irrelevant to the issue at hand: “Well, if you’re a white male Christian cisgender macho MAGA man, you can be as dumb as a rock and be deemed qualified to serve as Secretary of Defense.”

Rice still chafes that as a sometimes-official Obama administration spokeswoman, she serially and deliberately misled the country about the fatal 2012 terrorist attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi.

In all these cases, there was no fallout from racial categorization and demonization. Again, we apparently accept the pernicious idea that those identifying as an oppressed group cannot themselves voice illiberal stereotypes.

But while our political elites and celebrities seem fixated on using racial putdowns for career advantage and personal notoriety, the people increasingly ignore their entrenched and off-putting racism.

For example, in a recent Rasmussen poll surveying public attitudes toward Trump’s first 100 days in office, 62% of Hispanics voiced approval (higher than the 49% of whites). And 39% of blacks agreed.

One result of the 2024 campaign was that while Democrats seemed fixated on racial stereotypes, the public had moved on.

Voters increasingly see class considerations transcending race. That fact may explain why exasperated and flailing Democrats and leftists desperately seek to resurrect racial polarization instead of finding a popular middle-class agenda.

Historically, tribalism erodes a multiracial democracy.

It did when white leaders in the past expressed racist attitudes toward blacks. And it will again if black elites simply flip the paradigm and do the same.

(Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.)

Paul J. Gessing

Gov. Lujan Grisham recently went on the TV show Face the Nation to decry potential cuts to Medicaid. She even claimed the reforms would “destroy health care as we know it.” Pretty much every elected Democrat in New Mexico supports Medicaid as it currently exists. This is partially because they view it as an “economic development” program. That’s because the federal government picks up 72% of the bill while New Mexico pays “only” 28%.

That may sound like a great deal for New Mexicans until you realize that Medicaid spending is expected to grow by a mind-blowing 27% next year and spend an astonishing $15.5 billion. That’s 1/3rd larger than the State’s fast-growing general fund budget which pays for education and public safety (to name just two priorities). In other words, even with “just” 28% of that coming from New Mexicans, that’s STILL $4.34 billion state tax dollars. Of course, New Mexicans also pay federal taxes and bear the $36 trillion in federal debt, but who’s counting?

As part of their efforts to find savings to make way for the Trump tax cuts Republicans in Washington have put forth a few ideas that would constrain Medicaid spending. This is hardly a disaster for New Mexico, but our politicians have grown accustomed to “free” money and a bloated Medicaid budget.

As The Hill notes, “Provider taxes have been a lucrative loophole for states to get more federal Medicaid funding by taxing providers and then returning the money to them in the form of higher reimbursements for treatment.” The Republicans’ proposal would freeze all state taxes at their current rates and prevent states from imposing additional taxes. New Mexico has been imposing these taxes for years and In 2024 the Legislature passed a provider tax that helped the State fleece taxpayers in the other 49 states of $1.5 billion. This is abuse of the Medicaid system. Unfortunately, the Republicans’ plan only prohibits future such schemes, not existing ones.

It’s worth mentioning that New Mexico could easily afford to replace federal Medicaid dollars with its own money. The State is sitting on $61 billion in “savings.” In the recently-completed legislative session the State has set up a mechanism to accumulate another $2 billion for the explicit purpose of “replacing” federal Medicaid dollars if indeed cuts happen.

Another initiative of Congressional Republicans’ (again from The Hill) is “work requirements.” Under the proposal, states must enforce “community engagement” requirements on Medicaid enrollees beginning in 2029. Community engagement is defined as 80 hours of work, community service or a work program each month. Other options include at least half-time enrollment in an educational program or a combination of the available options.

We’d love to see that moved up (why wait until 2029), but with New Mexico’s abysmal workforce participation rate remains depressed by any historical metric. It is lower than it was before COVID and it is lower than it was going back to 1976. Adding work requirements to Medicaid is just common sense. Such requirements would actually improve the lives of the large numbers of New Mexicans who continue to sit on the sidelines of our labor force.

While Lujan Grisham and Democrats will undoubtedly claim that the sky is falling on New Mexico and other Medicaid-dependent states, reform of this bloated program is long overdue. Medicaid needs to be reformed dramatically and that really needs to come from the federal level.

We’d like to see the federal government block grant Medicaid dollars (and then shrink the program over time). That would both remove the incentive for New Mexico and other states to “game” the system as they clearly have been doing AND it would place the federal government on more sound budgetary footing.

If large numbers of New Mexicans fall through the cracks as Lujan Grisham and others claim, the State can easily step in with its own considerable resources.

Paul Gessing is president of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Foundation, an independent, nonpartisan, tax-exempt research and educational organization dedicated to promoting prosperity for New Mexico based on principles of limited government, economic freedom and individual responsibility.