Is Barbara Bollier a real doctor?

Let’s Talk About U.S. Senate candidate Barbara Bollier.

Call me old fashioned, but I like honesty and transparency in candidates for public office. I don’t respect a candidate who pretends to be something they are not. A little innuendo here, and another one there, and pretty soon the general public (e.g., those who don’t put politicians under a microscope like some of us do) thinks the candidate is something they are not. That, my friends, describes the soft-spoken but nefarious Barbara Bollier, who would like to be our next U.S. Senator from Kansas.

Take a look at the two screen shots below. They come from the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts website open to the public, and the details tell a story which Barbara Bollier would not like you to know.

So here are the facts in a nutshell.

Bollier went to medical school, followed by an out-of-state residency in anesthesiology, got licensed in Kansas and began practicing in Kansas as an Anesthesiologist in early 1987.

A mere twelve short years later, in 1999, she had stopped practicing as an anesthesiologist, and never again went back to the practice of her specialty. In her campaign materials, she speaks of joining her father’s anesthesia practice, but ….. she fails to admit it was a short stint, followed by a much longer 21 years of not practicing medicine since that time. That seems to me like an implication that she’s still licensed to practice as an anesthesiologist.

Throughout her materials, her ads, her website, and her commentary on social media, she holds herself out to be one who practices medicine. She is even seen with a stethoscope around her neck in some of her ads and photos. That sounds like “holding herself out to the public” in the statutes which describe the three different categories of physician licensure in Kansas.

It is true that once someone graduates from medical school, they have the right to be called “Doctor” so Barbara Bollier calling herself Doctor is just fine; she was a “doctor” even before she began her anesthesiology residency out of state, and long before she was licensed to practice medicine in Kansas. To be licensed, they must then comply with all the requirements of licensure in their chosen state(s), and they must keep up said licensure, complete all the required CME education, and other legal requirements which must be met each time they renew their license.

When one is licensed in the active practice of medicine in Kansas, said licensee is called “Active.” So absent knowledge to the contrary, we can assume that for those first twelve years, Bollier had an Active license.

No public records

No public records exist for what licensure designation she had with the Board of Healing Arts, if any, between the years 1999 through 2012, but by mid-2013, Bollier applied to the BOHA to have an “Exempt” license, presumably because she was involved in a contested primary election for the Kansas House, and she wanted to distinguish herself as a professional in her political materials.

So, since July of 2013, Barbara Bollier has annually renewed her Exempt License with the Kansas Board of Healing Arts. See the second photo below.

I encourage you to read the description of “Exempt” Licensure in the first photo. It is highly restrictive, and designed for those physicians who do not actively practice medicine in the state, nor carry malpractice insurance; nor hold themselves out to the public as being professionally engaged in such practice. There are a few volunteer things one can do …. but of importance here is that one thing I can guarantee you: An anesthesiologist is a physician who both puts one to sleep for surgery AND wakes one back up. There’s no way, if you haven’t practiced actual anesthesiology since 1999 that you can “volunteer” two decades later to hold someone’s life and death moments in your inexperienced hands. If she were a Family Doctor or GP, or some other general areas of medicine, then maybe she could volunteer her services for charitable purposes, but certainly not anesthesiology.

I retired a year ago after spending eight years as a member of the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts, so please know that IF ever Barbara Bollier wanted to go back to the active practice of medicine, it wouldn’t just happen automatically after filling out some forms. She would Petition the BOHA to change her designation to “Active” and appear before the Board. The BOHA would then offer her the opportunity to be evaluated at her own expense at an entity called CPEP (Center for Personalized Education for Professionals) in Denver, Colorado, or a similar institution, for an extensive evaluation of every nuance of her hands-on ability and her knowledge to perform her specialized practice of medicine. It is arduous, time-consuming, and very expensive, and then CPEP would issue a thorough, highly detailed report of her strengths and weaknesses, and make a recommendation, which the BOHA would take into account but not necessarily follow. However, it’s highly unusual for someone to want to return to the practice of medicine after a two-decade hiatus.

So I think we can all assume that Barbara Bollier is trading on her ‘quickie’ twelve years as an anesthesiologist which ended more than twenty years ago in order to hold herself out to the naïve general public as a qualified, practicing physician.

Among other things about her that rile me, that one’s a biggie.

–By Anne Hodgdon, former member of the Kansas board of Healing Arts