COMPAC announces candidate endorsements

Monday, September 01, 2014 12:28 PM

Physicians urged to consider recommendations

by CMS staff report

Unless you have cancelled your cable network and thrown your TV out the window, you are painfully aware that this is an election year. This means that physicians across the state have been hard at work interviewing candidates and helping the Colorado Medical Political Action Committee, (COMPAC), make decisions on what candidates to support in the upcoming election.

Through Sept. 10, 2014, COMPAC has endorsed 76 candidates for state and federal office this year. Physicians and all friends of medicine are encouraged to consider the recommendations that follow and, above all, to be sure to vote. This list represents endorsements made by press time – more will have been selected before the election. For an updated list, visit www.cms.org/advocacy/compac-endorsements. For help identifying the candidates running in your district, visit www.cms.org/advocacy/find-your-legislators.

COMPAC does not endorse based on political party. Instead, endorsements are made following a screening process that takes into account the views of the local medical community, the position of a candidate or incumbent on medical issues important to the medical society, the demographics of the district and a candidate’s ability to win.

COMPAC instituted the local physician screening process in the 2006 election cycle and hundreds of physicians have participated in the process since then. This has proven instrumental in developing relationships between local constituent physicians and members of the Colorado Legislature.

Colorado Medical Society has nearly 8,000 members with passionate beliefs from across the political spectrum. Alfred Gilchrist, CMS CEO, has seen first-hand the challenge medical society members often experience trying to separate personal politics from professional pragmatism.

“In my three-decade tenure as a physician advocate, I have found that physicians consistently and understandably struggle with separating their personal political beliefs from the more hard-nosed pragmatism that dictates medicine’s support of an elected official (or candidate) whose track record or predisposition is demonstrably pro-medicine even when at odds with local doctors’ own partisan or ideological leanings,” said Gilchrist.

Be sure to click here to read a column by COMPAC Chairman Dave Ross, DO, that provides more background on the strategy behind COMPAC endorsements that emphasizes not only the inherent value of physician engagement in the political process, but also one of the most fundamental rules of political engagement: ideological agnosticism.