Proposed federal regulatory changes to the Reasonably priced Care Act will mean “woke” political correctness will trump medical and ethical considerations, likely exacerbating a nursing and physician shortage within the U.S.
That’s one assessment on the proposed revisions released July 25 by the civil rights office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that would force health care staff to perform gender transition procedures; require medical health insurance plans to cover those costs; and certain remove federal conscience protection for those in health care who object to performing abortions.
On Aug. 4, the proposal was published by the Federal Register, opening a 60-day period for public comment that will be submitted here. The location describes alternative options for submitting comment. The last day for submissions is Oct. 3.
Proposed federal regulatory changes to the Reasonably priced Care Act will mean “woke” political correctness will trump medical and ethical considerations, likely exacerbating a nursing and physician shortage within the U.S.
“If this rule is final and enforced, it truly is changing the standards of care in medicine and an ideology is trumping science — this even shuts down the conversation about conscience rights,” said Dr. Tim Millea, an Iowa-based orthopedic surgeon and chair of the Health Care Policy Committee for the Pennsylvania-based Catholic Medical Association.
“This requires a debate, a debate is healthy and will be uncomfortable but is best than a mandate,” Millea told Catholic News Service Aug. 1. “To treat a patient who is available in and says, ‘I need my child on puberty blockers,’ you are usually not capable of refuse; you might be forced to refer them to someone who will.”
The CMA is a national, physician-led community of two,400 health care professionals consisting of 115 local guilds. The association has been expecting the HHS rule changes since last April, following discovery of a 74-page legal memorandum attached to a court filing from a consortium of 30 sexual rights groups.
The document revealed that HHS desires to revise its mandates on health plan coverage and performance to incorporate surgical abortion, cross-sex hormones, gender-transition surgeries, gender-affirming cosmetic surgeries and voice modification — together with a bunch of expanded services coping with fertility treatments, contraception, abortifacients and sterilizations.
“If this rule is final and enforced, it truly is changing the standards of care in medicine and an ideology is trumping science—this even shuts down the conversation about conscience rights.”
“The proposed rule is plagued by woke jargon corresponding to ‘pregnant person,’ ‘respondents who retained a uterus,’ ‘individual who doesn’t have a cervix,’ and ‘individual who doesn’t have a prostate,’ which is demeaning to each men and ladies,” in line with research from the Heritage Foundation.
“An unscientific gender standard of care, and requiring insurance policy to pay for it, the rule will lead to sterilization, lack of sexual function, removal of healthy reproductive organs, and a plethora of unnecessary surgeries and chemical interventions with lifelong consequences,” the muse said in an announcement.
The U.S. bishops in a July 27 statement saying that “assurances that HHS will honor religious freedom laws offer little comfort when HHS is actively fighting court rulings that declared HHS violated religious freedom laws the last time they tried to impose such a mandate.”
The “proposed regulations threaten our ability to perform our healing ministries, and others’ to practice medicine. They mandate health care staff to perform life-altering surgeries to remove perfectly healthy body parts,” the bishops said.
For its part, the CMA has since been working to research the proposed HHS rule changes in consultation with its member Catholic health care providers and including the Tennessee-based Christian Medical & Dental Associations and more recently the Baltimore-based Coalition for Jewish Values.
“Assurances that HHS will honor religious freedom laws offer little comfort when HHS is actively fighting court rulings that declared HHS violated religious freedom laws the last time they tried to impose such a mandate.”
The changes will likely apply to all health care providers, clinics, nursing homes, hospitals, group health insurers and third-party administrators of self-funded plans.
Millea said the situation is an “all hands on deck” moment for the CMA and its partners but that within the broader health care community there persists an “accommodation of acceptance, apathy and lack of competition” alongside the realty that individual medical professionals are too busy to read every 300-plus page document that comes along.
Unless successfully challenged, HHS may soon force all U.S. medical professionals to perform abortions, gender transition surgeries, or assisted suicide against their moral religious and clinical judgment — amounting to an assault on their rights and on their patients’ best interests, in line with the CMA.
Moreover, more government intrusion into the art and practice of health care will translate into an extra reduction of future medical professionals who’ve moral or ethical objections to abortion and gender transition procedures for instance.
“If I’m a highschool or college kid and wish to enter medicine and I realize I won’t find a way to do what is correct for our patients in all situations, we’re going to take the very best and brightest and discourage them from this profession,” Millea said.
Unless successfully challenged, HHS may soon force all U.S. medical professionals to perform abortions, gender transition surgeries, or assisted suicide against their moral religious and clinical judgment.
“It should change into a career with blinders that change into greater on a regular basis; it is going to change into a closed system with no open debate any longer,” he added.
The CMA is looking on every state legislature to enact strong medical conscience rights and non secular freedom protections for his or her state’s health care professionals.
Closely monitoring the situation is the Colorado-based Catholic Advantages Association, which provides legal advocacy and litigation in defense of the First Amendment rights for its membership of over 1,000 Catholic employers, including 60 dioceses and archdioceses, quite a few religious orders, colleges and universities, hospitals and other ministries.
Attorney Martin Nussbaum of Nussbaum Speir Gleason in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a legal firm which advises the Catholic Advantages Association, said he has begun to review the document.
He believes the association’s member health care providers can be substantially shielded from the brand new HHS rule by the injunctive relief from a gender transition services mandate already secured in 2021 and which applies to present association members and future members.
“People should consider making comments, and HHS is required to take a look at that and respond before it issues final rule.”
Nevertheless, unless something changes, most employers usually can be compelled to follow the proposed latest HHS gender ideology, which can likely be enforced by the Department of Labor. It could have a broad cost and compliance impact on all U.S. employers and would disallow religious exemptions.
The proposed HHS regulations would apply to implementation of an ACA provision, Section 1557, which prohibits discrimination on the idea of race, color, national origin, age, disability or sex — including pregnancy, sexual orientation and gender identity — in covered health programs or activities.
The HHS proposal will likely apply to all health care providers, clinics, nursing homes, hospitals, group health insurers and third-party administrators of self-funded plans.
“People should consider making comments, and HHS is required to take a look at that and respond before it issues final rule,” Nussbaum told CNS Aug. 2, referring to the prospect to comment now that the proposal has been published.
He said HHS will then take a while to review public comment after which issue its final rules, which can likely differ in some areas, he added.
“The rule may be very complex, but we can be reading it with a tremendous tooth comb, sponsoring webinars for our members and others and to teach Catholic employers and health care providers about this and assessing whether to make comments,” Nussbaum said. “But we’ll protect our members from these immoral rules.”
Nussbaum points out that even the HHS document points out that a markedly tiny percentage of the general public would consider themselves candidates for so-called gender reassignment and even fewer will ultimately pursue drugs or procedures to undergo with irreversible “gender migration,” a procedure that can lead to full lack of sexual function and render an individual infertile.
“It’s all so unnecessary. Why would the administration cause all this tumult for the country when by their very own statements it only affects lower than 0.0022 to 0.0173% of individuals — most of whom is not going to even select these surgeries, based on a California study,” Nussbaum said.