I’m pretty down on the medical industry as a whole, and I’m not entirely comfortable with that. After all, we need health care for what should be obvious reasons. But the fact that it seems so many physicians are embracing an anti-gun narrative–not all, mind you, just the ones amplified by the mainstream media–makes it a lot harder to place your trust in a new doctor, if you don’t already have one.

And these doctors are all over the country. They’re not centrally located in places like New York City or Chicago. No, that would be too easy.

Take Alabama, for example. It’s an incredibly pro-gun state, but it seems some doctors there want the state’s Medicaid program to reimburse them for talking gun safety with parents.

A physician told Alabama’s Medicaid Agency Thursday that the state needed to spend newly-available federal money to address child gun violence cases. 

“We learned that there would be money on the table for state Medicaid to reimburse pediatricians for firearm safety counseling, which is something we’re already doing in our primary care clinic,” said Dr. Morissa Ladinsky, a University of Alabama Birmingham (UAB) provider representing primary care providers, during a meeting of the agency’s medical care advisory committee. 

Alabama Medicaid pays health care costs of about 80% of child gun violence cases.  New federal guidance allows states to pay providers through Medicaid for parental and caregiver counseling on firearm safety and injury prevention.

In fiscal year 2022, nearly 57% of all Alabama children were covered by Medicaid, according to Alabama Medicaid, and firearms were the leading cause of death in 2022 among Alabama children aged 1-17, according to the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Alabama had 25.5 firearm deaths per 100,000 people in 2022, the fourth-highest gun death rate in the nation. Alabama had more total gun deaths that year than New York State, which has almost four times the population of Alabama.

Of course, those are the wrong statistics to use if you’re going to sell this. After all, the Medicaid payments would be for pediatricians, which means you’d need to focus on unintentional child deaths and injuries resulting from a gunshot. Those are ridiculously low, all things considered, though, and such wouldn’t make quite the compelling case.

But my question here is, why do they need to be reimbursed at all?

Don’t get me wrong, I believe doctors deserve to be paid for their work, but do they get specific payments for talking about proper nutrition or the importance of exercise for young patients? Not, not really. It’s part of their job, after all. It’s just part of what they do.

If gun safety counseling is so important that they simply have to do it, why do they need special reimbursement to do it? I mean, we’re not talking about a four-hour class here. What it should amount to is basically them saying, “Hey, if you have a gun in the house, it’s important that you keep it secured in either a gun safe or with a gun lock. Here’s a flier with resources for getting a gun lock if you don’t already have one.”

They’re not teaching them to do a perfect Mozambique drill from the gun safe in four seconds or anything. It shouldn’t take that long, even if you do it during every visit, which would be ridiculous in and of itself.

I can’t help but get the feeling that this is nothing more than a way for anti-gun doctors to try and make bank on their advocacy within their practice. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what the ask here is, but based on what I’ve seen from some of these physicians in recent years, I’m pretty sure I got it right.