Incoming AMA president: ‘We simply will not stand’ for anti-trans healthcare restrictions
Doctor Jesse Ehrenfeld sat down with the Washington Blade on Tuesday, weeks ahead of the start of his tenure as the American Medical Association’s first openly gay president and amid an onslaught of legislative attacks targeting trans Americans’ access to healthcare. “We see the attack on reproductive care, reproductive access, and transgender healthcare as a continuum of government overreach into patient-physician decision making,” Ehrenfeld said. “We simply will not stand for the government coming in to interfere with the doctor-patient relationship,” such as by passing these laws that “outlaw what we know to be appropriate, evidence-based clinical guidelines-based care,” he said.
An anesthesiologist who serves as the Joseph A. Johnson Jr. Distinguished Leadership Professor of anesthesiology, surgery, biomedical informatics & health policy at Vanderbilt University’s School of Medicine, much of Ehrenfeld’s professional background has been focused on matters of healthcare access, particularly for LGBTQ patients.
Ehrenfeld directs a $560 million philanthropic organization, Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment, while also serving as a consultant for the World Health Organization’s Digital Health Technical Advisory Group.
He was special adviser to former U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who served during the Trump administration. For his research on “understanding how can we use technology to work better for LGBTQ people,” in 2018 Ehrenfeld became the inaugural recipient of the NIH’s Sexual and Gender Minority Research Investigator Award.
