My beliefs are that felons are unredeemable and undeserving of any care provision whatsoever. Hence, "just those specific services" becomes all health care.
One should always imagine the worst case when writing good laws. Unfortunately, we all know this law is not meant to be good, it's meant to be a wedge.
this bill does not allow exclusion of medical care based on your beliefs about the patient, but based on your beliefs about the medical care in question.
[It is deeply weird how uncurious the comments on this particular article are.]
you keep saying this, but if a doctor believes that a gay person is not a human being because of religion, this bill would allow them to prevent giving that person any kind of care.
"i have a persistent cough and need a check up."
"sorry, i'm going to deny you a routine check up based on my belief that homosexuality is a sin. providing this procedure to you would be tacit support of homosexuality."
it isn't a "personal boogeyman" because it's literally in the text of the bill. you seem intent on pretending that this is related solely to "procedures" which apply to everyone when that is plainly not what the bill states.
(g) “Health care service” means medical research, medical
98 procedures, or medical services, including, but not limited to,
99 testing; diagnosis; referral; dispensing or administering any
100 drug, medication, or device; psychological therapy or
101 counseling; research; therapy; recordmaking procedures; set up
102 or performance of a surgery or procedure; or any other care or
103 services performed or provided by any health care provider.
104 (h) “Participate” or “participation” means to pay for or
105 take part in any way in providing or facilitating any health
106 care service or any part of such service.
furthermore:
(5) IMMUNITY FROM LIABILITY.—A health care provider or
195 health care payor may not be held civilly liable solely for
196 declining to participate in or pay for a health care service on
197 the basis of a conscience-based objection.
meaning, a secretary in a doctor's office can prevent a gay person from making an appointment for any "procedure" at all because doing so would be facilitating a health care service that they personally object to.
This analysis of "what's the worst that could happen" is insufficient as the appropriate test is "what's the worst that could happen and how often could it happen"
Things that can go very wrong, but which in practice we may expect to be extremely rare are not necessarily large problems.
They are still problems. They can be somewhat neutered when they clearly go against the spirit of the law. Unfortunately, this is not the case here: since the spirit of the law is effectively to move decisive power from patient to doctor on grounds of personal and un-objective opinions, aberrations fit pretty nicely inside it.
Notice how amendments to protect sexual orientation were rejected; that is very much a "worst case" (and statistically significant) that could have been easily avoided, bringing no ill-effects, additional ambiguity or implementation costs. Still, the legislator explicitly decided that case will fit in the law.
So a doctor could refuse to prescribe PrEP or treat STDs? Also, it does look like services could be denied to specific people based on gender identity or sexuality, per the article.
> While the legislation says that health care providers can't use it to deny care based on a patient's race, color, religion, sex or national origin, attempts by Democratic lawmakers to extend those protections to gender identity and sexuality failed.
> The article lies and pretends it's about the person. This is not true.
can you back this up? where in the bill text does it say this? i've read through it and nowhere does it make a differentiation between denying care based on "treatment" vs "person".
Courts are pretty good at awarding large dollar amounts and/or throwing people in jail when they lie to the court. Which is what would be required if someone attempted this, since (as far as I'm aware) there's no religion or cult in history that believes anything remotely approaching this very strange straw man.
Certainly it's debatable if doctors should be able to deny treatments they think aren't harmful but they see as religiously offensive. But the root disagreement here is primarily about harm, and we already have agreed as a society that doctors have a duty to not knowingly harm their patients. If you can frame something as a civil rights issue, that can help resolve some conflicts but doesn't do much in terms of resolving contentions around if a specific procedure is harmful to a patient or not. In medicine, it does simply boil down to either persuading physicans that the procedure isn't harmful, or determining as a society we will no longer accredit people as physicians if they believe it is harmful.
I am looking forwards to seeing what happens when every insurance company operating in Florida suddenly gets a new religion that just so happens to conflict with paying out any money. I think there's ample precedent in most insurance company's actions to "determine such beliefs by reference to the entities’ governing documents; any published ethical, moral, or religious guidelines or directives; mission statements; constitutions; articles ofincorporation; bylaws; policies; or regulations".
1. your sincere religious beliefs impelled you to deny all medical care to people based on their beliefs - in other words your religion establishes that certain beliefs make you an unperson.
AND
2. This bill were written saying anything at all about denying all medical care, which it is not, since the provider would be forced to identify specific forms of care that they were unwilling to provide to _all_ people, rather than _all_ forms of care to _certain_ people.
> in other words your religion establishes that certain beliefs make you an unperson.
Not an unperson, but equivalent to supporting the enemy. Would you be comfortable saving the life of a person you know is a mass murderer, who hasn't yet been arrested of charged, and thus would be free to murder again after you save their life, for instance?
Doctors literally do this all the time. This is part of what it means to be a doctor. ER surgeons don't get to know whether the patient is a "good guy or a bad guy" before they save the patient's life.
And this bill doesn't change that long-established approach to medicine.
So, if I was a Dr., and a supporter of this law came under my care for a serious condition, could I throw him out of my office because of my religious beliefs
If the article is right then there are certain classes of people that can be denied service.
> While the legislation says that health care providers can't use it to deny care based on a patient's race, color, religion, sex or national origin, attempts by Democratic lawmakers to extend those protections to gender identity and sexuality failed.
Frankly I’m very skeptical of the language of the bill. I can’t really think of a specific medical procedure that can be broadly blanket banned on religious grounds that doesn’t come off as extreme or discriminatory: even if one is against abortion, helping to expel a dead fetus is the exact same medical procedure. Even if one is against hormone replacement therapy for trans people, the process of assisting low-testosterone men or menopausal women is the same prescriptions.
I could imagine a doctor who would find circumcision ok but is against gender affirming surgery for minors. But like, idk, what’s the legal difference here that isnt discriminatory?
I'm very confused by your comment - where does the language of the bill say anything about _banning_ medical procedures? And do you get the impression that there are a lot of (or any) doctors in Florida qualified to expel dead fetuses who would prefer to refuse that medical procedure? Or is this just a very detailed straw man?
> And do you get the impression that there are a lot of (or any) doctors in Florida qualified to expel dead fetuses
Just so you know, all gynecologists can do this. Miscarriage occurs in upwards of 1/3 pregnancies, and if the body doesn’t expel the fetus the gynecologist has to do it, known as a d&c and is basically just an abortion.
I’m pointing out that I’m co fused by the idea that a doctor can refuse to perform a procedure on moral or religious grounds but cannot discriminate on who that procedure is on, because I can’t imagine any single procedure that would be opposed to on sincere belief grounds that isnt discriminatory!
> [...] Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion. But I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art. [...]
Doctors aren't even made to swear to this oath. They can if they want to, or another oath if they please, or no oath at all as far as I know.
I have to imagine you're more capable of having a serious philosophical discussion than this sounds.
There is a huge difference between offering to treat only those whom you like, and offering to do only the types of procedures you believe are "good".
We have rightly outlawed the former for many categories of supposed goodness/badness. But forcing people to start performing new treatments that are the societal cause du jour that would not previously have been part of their job description is quite arguably federalized slavery. The goalposts will never stop shifting, so either swear eternal and unwavering fealty to the state or go find a different job?
It's quite rich when a forum of techies who mostly can find a well-paying job doing almost nothing of lasting value for anyone can find time to judge medical professionals who improve people's health on a daily basis because of a difference of opinion about the job description of those healthcare professionals.
Any medical professional that turns down, for example, a hormonal treatment or tubal ligation or vasectomy ... a treatment that could improve a human being's quality of life ... based on their own morality or religion ...
They're no doctor to me. I'd be disgusted with that action. IMHO that isn't the doctor's decision. The only decision is, will this improve or extend the patient's quality of life and abide by the patient's consent?
The government or medical regulators should make the decisions for the entire industry EXACTLY so these decisions are not left to the medical professional. Their opinion on what's moral or not should not come into it.
Don't compare tech jobs with medicine. Yes, I can decide not to work in defense because I don't want to help build machines that kill. That's a moral decision.
A doctor is making decisions that often relate to immediate, critical and long-lasting actions to other humans. Other people.
The US medical system does it's best to devalue human life, so this isn't a shock.
What if you were denied medical treatment based on a moral disagreement by a medical professional? Maybe they were a different religion to you, and found helping you would damage their chances at going to their afterlife?
To get there, they're going to help you on your way to yours.
While the law tries to make it so it isn't always case-by-case, but rather allows broad exclusion ... the outcome is the same.
Ultimately, this is cultural cleansing. Conform, or be punished.
The lack of compassion and tolerance is sickening. This is far-right conservatism dressed up as liberalism.
Again, standard US.
I'd imagine that in the case of religious discretion, their God would judge them harshly.
Only because it's the government imposing them, and the government (not private sector) is constitutionally forbidden from interfering with religious exercise.
If there's anyone left in the comment section now that this has been flagged and consigned to the outer darkness...
Please take a moment and imagine a world in which software developers were all forced to spend 4 weeks a year building drone missile AIs for Palantir so that the US can bomb weddings in Yemen.
Further imagine that you started your career before the US had drones, so the possibility that your skills would be required to bomb birthday parties had not occurred to you when you initially chose your current field.
Obviously not everyone here is in agreement about the moral status of various forms of medical services. That's fine - as it happens, apparently not everyone in the US is in agreement about the moral status of bombing weddings in Yemen either!!
But a failure to understand that – especially in a big tent society – sometimes people with certain skills don't want to put them to use in the way that other people want to see them put to use, is a truly remarkable failure of imagination for a message board filled with people of above-average brainpower.
The only "objectionable" therapy, out there in the real world, is abortion. Roe vs Wade is from 1973, literally 50 years ago. That means any doctor who graduated before RvW is now well past retirement age, and so is under no obligation to administer anything.
Unless the problem is not the therapy, but the patient, in which case I agree that there are definitely doctors out there who graduated when it could be expected of them never to serve gays and minorities; but this law, according to its supporters even here on HN, is definitely not about that, so your comment is irrelevant.
The bill allows providers to decline to provide specific services where those services are in opposition to their beliefs.
It does not allow them to deny all health care, just those specific services they are opposed to.
It's a subtle difference, but an important one.