A federal judge stated that the HHS conscience rule limited patient access to care and impeded on patient non-discrimination rights.
A federal judge has struck down the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) moral and religious conscience rule, which initially made it easier for healthcare professionals to claim a moral objection to providing certain types of medical care.
The rule in question, finalized in early May 2019, states that providers, medical professionals, or other individuals involved in patient care do not have to provide, participate in, pay for, or provide coverage for a medical procedure that goes against their moral or religious views.
The rule also includes protections for articles listed in an advance directive.
Want to publish your own articles on DistilINFO Publications?
Send us an email, we will get in touch with you.
The rule applies to federally funded healthcare clinics.
“Finally, laws prohibiting government funded discrimination against conscience and religious freedom will be enforced like every other civil rights law,” Roger Severino, the director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights, said back in May. “This rule ensures that healthcare entities and professionals won’t be bullied out of the health care field because they decline to participate in actions that violate their conscience, including the taking of human life. Protecting conscience and religious freedom not only fosters greater diversity in healthcare, it’s the law,” Severino concluded.
The rule stated that HHS could withdraw federal funding for certain employee complaints about impositions on moral or religious conscience rights, HHS and OCR stated.
But those rules are akin to coercion, according to US District Judge Paul Engelmayer.
“Wherever the outermost line where persuasion gives way to coercion lies, the threat to pull all HHS funding here crosses it,” Engelmayer wrote in his decisions, as reported by Reuters.
Engelmayer also stated that the HHS rule was “arbitrary and capricious” and got in the way of other federal protections for religious liberty in the workplace. The rule also impeded requirements to deliver emergency treatment to all patients, including those who are low-income and who might rely on federally funded hospitals and clinics.
The HHS final moral conscience rule quickly drew ire from critics, who banded together to file the lawsuit in the Southern District of New York.
The plaintiffs, who included district attorneys in New York City, Chicago, and Washington DC, and attorneys general New York, Massachusetts, Michigan Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and a number of other states and municipalities, argued that this civil rights rule infringed on the civil rights of other Americans.
Specifically, the HHS rule did not take into account the right for patients to access medical care by essentially allowing medical providers to deny healthcare on the basis of their own moral convinctions. In turn, these providers could deny patients their own rights to health, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said upon filing the lawsuit.
“Access to medically accurate and necessary health care is a basic civil right,” Healey said in a statement. “Providers should not be able to use their personal beliefs as an excuse to deny needed care. We are suing to protect the lives and health of our residents.”
The rule gets in the way of states’ own authority, the attorneys general added. State laws that may be infringed upon include:
- Emergency department access regulations
- Rules about abandoning patients
- Requirements about answering patient questions and referring them to relevant or necessary care
- Requirements for access to prescriptions
- Requirements for access to comprehensive reproductive care
- Rules about payer coverage for reproductive health services such as contraception
Proponents of the rule asserted that it protected medical workers who had been facing some sort of pressure or persecution in the medical setting because of their religious beliefs. The rule sought to protect those medical professionals from negative consequences for choosing not to administer, participate in, pay for, or provide coverage for a medical procedure that may have gone against their beliefs, a civil right HHS contended was in need of protecting.
But Judge Engelmayer suggested that this rule was making a problem out of nothing, noting that HHS made “factually untrue” and “demonstrably false” claims about increases in conscience objection violations.
HHS has stated it is still reviewing Judge Engelmayer’s ruling, while some industry groups are calling this a win for healthcare access and patient rights.
“Today’s decision is an important victory against the Trump Administration’s cruel and unlawful attempts to roll back critical patient protections,” Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, senior staff attorney with the Reproductive Freedom Project at the ACLU, said in a statement. “Everyone is entitled to their religious beliefs, but religious beliefs do not include a license to discriminate, to deny essential care, or to cause harm to others.”
Source: Patient Eengagement Hit