Obama Administration Alters Conscience Protections for Health Care Workers

On February 18, 2011, a two-year struggle to find a balance for the rights and beliefs of healthcare workers with the rights for patient services found new ground. The Obama administration rescinded a portion of a Bush-era federal regulation intended to protect health workers who refuse to provide care they find objectionable on moral or religious grounds.

The US Department of Health and Human Services claimed that the current rule was “unclear and potentially overbroad in scope” and issued a revised rule that it said “reaffirms the Department’s commitment to longstanding federal conscience statutes by maintaining and building upon provisions of the Bush administration rule that established an enforcement process for federal conscience laws, while rescinding the definitions and terms of the previous rule that caused confusion and could be taken as overly broad.”

A recent Washington Post article states: "The decision guts one of President George W. Bush's most controversial legacies: a rule that was widely interpreted as shielding workers who refuse to participate in a range of medical services, such as providing birth control pills, caring for gay men with AIDS and performing in-vitro fertilization for lesbians or single women."

Reacting to the decision, Dr. J. Scott Ries, speaking for the 16,000-member Christian Medical Association, protested what he called a decision to “weaken the only federal regulation protecting the exercise of conscience in health care.”

While current language provides protection for healthcare workers who object to providing certain medical services, the revised language does not alter federal health care provider conscience protection statutes as they pertain to abortions and sterilization procedures. The revised language was noted to call for a much narrower version of the original statute.

Understanding that such "Hot Topics" can touch off opinions born from very deep convictions and personal stories for both healthcare workers and patients, we'd like to know what you think:

1. As a healthcare worker, are you in favor of the recent changes to the federal health care provider conscience protection statutes?
2. Are you concerned that the revised rule will weaken federal conscience laws and protections for health care workers, despite assurances and language to the contrary?
3. Do you have any knowledge of a physician or other health care worker being fired, disciplined, or in any way penalized for refusing medical services based on religious or moral grounds?
4. In your view, did the previous regulation put at risk reproductive health services?
5. How do you think the changes to the rule will affect patient care in the future?

We encourage you to educate yourself about this regulation change and to hear the opinions of both sides of this controversy. For more information, visit recent posts by both Washington Post and LifeNews.com . Both of these articles provide facts and quotes from parties on both sides of this revised regulation language.

We invite your responses!