" Health care workers, hospitals and even entire insurance companies
can decline to perform, refer or pay for any health care practice that
violates a "religious belief or moral conviction
"
Bush's Last-Minute "Conscience" Rules Cause Furor
http://www.truthout.org/122008E
Health care workers, hospitals and even entire insurance companies
could decline to perform, refer or pay for abortion or any other
health care practice that violates a "religious belief or moral
conviction" under new rules issued by the outgoing Bush
administration.
"This rule protects the right of medical providers to care for
their patients in accord with their conscience," said Health and
Human
Services Secretary Michael Leavitt.
But opponents of the rule, now set to take effect Jan. 19, say it
could threaten patients' health. "This is a very wide, broadly
written
regulation that upsets what has been a carefully established balance
between respecting the religious views of providers, while also
making
sure that we're guaranteeing patients access to health care," said
Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of
America.
For example, Richards said, many states currently have laws
requiring that rape victims treated in hospital emergency rooms be
offered the option of taking emergency contraceptive pills to prevent
pregnancy. But she said that because providers who don't believe in
emergency contraception could now simply opt not to tell women about
that option, "under this rule, we believe that in fact now women who
are the victim of sexual assault either would not be guaranteed
either
information or health care access to emergency contraception."
That slap at state laws spurred opposition from more than a dozen
state attorneys general when the regulations were first proposed.
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal says he'll fight to
see the new rule rescinded.
"This rule is an appalling insult and abuse - a midnight power
grab to deny access to health care services and information,
including
even to victims of rape," Blumenthal said.
But Leavitt said he felt compelled to issue the new rules after
what he termed an unsatisfactory exchange last year with the
organizations that represent the nation's obstetricians and
gynecologists over a new set of ethics guidelines.
"It came about primarily because some of the professional
association were trying to define as competence a willingness to
perform abortion. And I think that's wrong," Leavitt said in
September. "A person can be perfectly competent and feel it's not
morally correct to perform an abortion. And they ought to have the
capacity to be protected in that right."
That ethics policy, however, from the American College of
Obstetricians and Gynecologists, had less to do with whether doctors
should be willing to perform abortions or other potentially
controversial services, and more to do with what they should do if
they were unwilling to perform them. In those cases, according to the
policy, doctors should tell patients upfront and refer them to
someone
who is willing to provide the services.
Under the new regulations, however, such referrals will not be
required. That pleases groups like the Family Research Council. "What
these conscience regulations do is let the individual decide what
their conscience is, and not the federal government, be it Barack
Obama or George Bush," said Tom McClusky, the group's vice president
of government affairs.
But Barack Obama made it clear during the presidential campaign
that he disapproved of the rules. The president-elect said an early
version of the regulations "raises troubling issues about access to
basic health care for women, particularly access to contraceptives."
While the incoming president can't simply wipe out the rules with
the stroke of a pen, there is a relatively abbreviated process for
taking them off the books. It's called the Congressional Review Act.
And because the Bush administration issued the regulation late in the
current president's term, the new Congress will have 75 legislative
days to pass a "motion of disapproval." All it takes is a simple
majority of votes by the House and Senate, and the motion is not
subject to delaying tactics in the Senate.
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