Efficiency and Accountability in Your Health Care
What’s AFP’s favorite trend of 2025? That’s an easy answer—it’s the renewed enthusiasm for getting government out of the way from preventing you from living your American Dream.
Recent polls have shown that almost three quarters of Americans support the mission of DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency. We agree that transparency and accountability are important—and that’s why AFP has made it our mission for over two decades to tackle burdensome regulations that impact taxpayers’ day-to-day lives. While many think of regulatory barriers as hindering our economic prosperity through preventing the approval of permits in a timely manner or keeping businesses from investing in the commonwealth, there’s other ways in which regulatory barriers keep us from success. Governmental overreach in our health care system, through the means of new licensure, keep many Pennsylvanians from accessing high-quality, low-cost care.
That’s why Americans for Prosperity launched the Personal Option: a campaign to highlight the need for greater independent choice and control in your care. You know what’s best for your family—and that’s why health care should be customized to fit your individual needs. By rejecting a top-down approach to health care, we can ensure better health care outcomes for Pennsylvania’s patients.
This legislative session in Harrisburg brings opportunity for bipartisan solutions that address the regulatory barriers within our health care system. First, with the introduction of Senate Bill 25, Full Practice Authority for Nurse Practitioners, Harrisburg can address our health care provider shortage by modernizing our current licensure laws around Certified Registered Nurse Practitioners to remove the burdensome collaborative agreement with physicians, which ultimately prevents NPs from practicing in areas of the commonwealth where we need them most. Additionally, this enjoys widespread support: polling shows that over half of Pennsylvanians support this measure. Now’s not the time for archaic restrictions to hold qualified practitioners back from addressing our patients’ most critical needs!
In a similar vein, a new regulation from the Department of State Bureau of Professional and Occupational Affairs, currently sitting in the proposed phase with the Independent Regulatory Review Commission, would add additional burdensome requirements to those seeking to become a licensed practical nurse or a certified nurse aide. This is concerning for a multitude of reasons, but one concern remains at the forefront: this new proposed regulation, which would hinder our access to care, has the ability to circumvent the legislature—which is YOUR voice in Harrisburg.
Pennsylvanians can’t afford to have unnecessary regulatory barriers to care burden our aging population. Harrisburg, through the legislative process, should be working to address and remove restrictions to care, as opposed to allowing bureaucrats to draft new barriers, which only feed into our growing health care shortage.
Our words of wisdom to policymakers in Harrisburg: embrace regulatory reform. Embrace a Personal Option. And, of course, embrace legislative oversight over decisions that impact the lives of our roughly 13 million Pennsylvanians across the commonwealth.
Head to PersonalOption.com to learn more.
