One of former president Donald Trump’s most dangerous and anti-LGBTQ+ rules was blocked by federal court for years, but now it has been officially eliminated and replaced by the Biden administration.
The rule would allowed doctors and other medical professionals to refuse to treat patients for religious reasons. Pregnant women and the LGBTQ+ community were the targets of the rule.
The workers who could claim a religious exemption to do their jobs included doctors, nurses, pharmacists, billing staff, receptionists, and emergency responders.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a final rule yesterday that removed the possibility.
“The so-called ‘Denial of Care Rule,’ which was issued in May 2019, confronted health care facilities with the real risk losing essential federal funding if they did not grant employees carte blanche to deny services,” Lambda Legal Chief Legal Officer Jennifer C. Pizer explained. “Because the rule was confusing and infeasible to implement, many health care facilities could have been forced to eliminate services such as reproductive and LGBTQ care, leaving millions across the United States without access to critical health care.”
“While the earlier discriminatory and dangerous rule has been blocked for more than five years, it nonetheless has loomed ominously over both health care providers and potential patients, representing the very real threat of blockages of medical care delivery when patients are most in need.”
“We are grateful that HHS has removed from the books the prior rule’s explicit invitation to discriminate against pregnant people, anyone in need of gender-affirming medical care, and LGBTQ+ patients in general, regardless of their medical needs,” she continued. “No patient– no matter their religion, sex, race, gender identity, or sexual orientation – should fear being denied the medical care they need based on other people’s religious beliefs.”
Anti-LGBTQ activist Roger Severino formerly led the HHS’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) under Trump. He used the position to push for religious exemptions to civil rights laws. In his previous role as director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society for the Heritage Foundation, Severino spoke out against the civil rights protections he was tasked with upholding as HHS head.
While at the Heritage Foundation, he authored a report opposing the OCR’s implementation of a portion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) known as the 1557 rule, which prohibited discrimination based on race, color, national origin, age, disability, and sex in federally-funded health programs.
Betsy DeVos served as Trump’s head of the Education Department, where she led efforts to repeal protections for LGBTQ+ students and actively make schools more hostile to them.
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