Bush's last-minute rule change could allow doctors to reject gay patients

The Bush administration issued a “right of conscience” regulation last week that could enable health care workers to deny treatment to gay patients based on religious beliefs, according to activists.

Issued Dec. 18, the rule allows the federal government to withhold funds from health care facilities if they do not permit workers to opt out of performing medical procedures they find objectionable based on religious or moral grounds.

The 127-page regulation, which is estimated to cost $44 million to implement, is primarily aimed at allowing health workers to opt out of performing abortions. But Lara Schwartz, legal director for the Human Rights Campaign, said the rule could enable health care providers to decline to provide services for gay people — even for treatment of a common cold.

“It’s not clear that that is the intent,” she said, “but it absolutely does not preclude that result, which is one of the reasons that HRC submitted comments asking them to draft it differently.”\\

http://www.southernvoice.com/2008/12-26/news/national/9614.cfm

Then we should have a rule allowing liberal doctors to refuse treatment to white Southern Baptists and Mormons.

It's their "conscience", remember.

for birth control and Plan B

This is the next logical step

Of COURSE nuts will refuse to treat gays....and women working away from the home, and PICK whatever else the nuts could object to

How about old people..you know, why waste meds and treatment? Or the obese? Or..INSERT ANYTHING HERE

bad rule from an idiot

Unless congress gets some balls and overrides this draconian law--we all all sucked into decades of abuses.


..............Schwartz said refusing to provide artificial-insemination services for a lesbian couple would be one possible procedure in which medical workers could refuse to participate based on the regulation.

In a Dec. 19 statement, HRC said a health care worker might be able to refuse to administer an HIV test to gay patients and even be exempt from telling them where else they could receive the test.

Additionally, pharmacists could refuse to fill a prescription for hormone therapy if they have objections to transgender people, HRC says.

Health & Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, in a statement Dec. 18, said the rule “protects the right of medical providers to care for their patients in accord with their conscience.”

“Doctors and other health care providers should not be forced to choose between good professional standing and violating their conscience,” he said.

Kevin Schweers, a spokesperson for the Department of Health & Human Services, said the new regulation does not change existing civil rights laws in any way and said “it would be impermissible to decline to provide or participate in a service if the decision is based on an individual’s characteristics that are federally protected.”

I believe it's immoral to be a Republican, so I choose not to treat them.

As a pharmacist, I've got an assistant that examines the back bumpers of my customers' cars; anyone with a McCain bumper sticker or a Jesus fish gets to see me light their prescription on fire.

Why not? Bush's regulation is so poorly written, I can do any damn thing I want!