Trump rules on LGBTQ care assailed
The Trump administration’s plan to allow medical staff to deny treatment to lesbians, gays, transgender patients and others because of religious or moral objections drew a new legal challenge Tuesday from doctors’ groups and patients’ advocates, who said it would drive LGBTQ patients into the closet and weaken health care for vulnerable populations.
The rule, scheduled to take effect July 22, is part of the administration’s “aggressive effort to expand enforcement of religious-objection laws at the expense of patients,” said the suit, filed in federal court in San Francisco. It said
the plan violates numerous federal laws and the constitutional separation of church and state.
The Department of Health and Human Services rule would allow any health care staff member — doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers or receptionists — to refuse services on religious or moral grounds, without advance notice to patients or employers. In addition to care for LGBTQ patients, it focuses on abortion, sterilization and physician aid in dying.
Under the rule, said Roger Severino, director of the department’s Office for Civil Rights, individuals “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.”
The plan has been met by a series of lawsuits — by the city of San Francisco and the state of California, both filed in San Francisco, and by 19 states and three cities, filed in New York — that cite their duty to provide bias-free health care and the potential loss of billions of dollars in federal funds for refusing to comply.
Plaintiffs in Tuesday’s suit include Santa Clara County, whose health systems receive hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government each year. The new element in the suit, said attorney Jamie Gliksberg of the gayrights group Lambda Legal, is a new set of plaintiffs: groups of health care organizations and medical students from across the nation, some specializing in LGBTQ and reproductive care, and doctors suing on behalf of their patients.
“These are providers of last resort,” and “some will have to close their doors” if the new rule takes effect, Gliksberg said. She said allowing health care providers to withhold services because of personal objections to gay, lesbian or transgender patients “encourages them to remain in the closet when seeking health care.”
U.S. law allows federally funded health care providers to refuse to perform abortions or sterilizations, and allows doctors to withhold other services that violate their religious or moral convictions. The Trump administration’s proposal is a binding regulation that would apply to all staff members and would cut off funding to non-compliant state and local governments.
Under the new rule, the lawsuit said, health providers could not ask prospective employees if they objected to providing any services and would not have to be notified if an employee was withholding care. The rule also applies to pharmacists and thus might make medication unavailable, the suit said.
“The rule threatens patients’ ability to obtain needed and even emergency care ... particularly with respect to contraception, abortion, end-of-life care, and gender-affirming health care” for transgender patients, the suit said. “It encourages and in some instances may even require the imposition of the beliefs of a single employee” on an entire institution and its patients.