Florida health care can now be denied based on moral, ethical, religious beliefs
pnj.com
pnj.com
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.
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.
[It is deeply weird how uncurious the comments on this particular article are.]
"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's not actually true though.
Argue about reality, not your personal boogeyman.
(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.
here's the bill text: https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/1580/BillText/er/.... it's quite short, you should read it.
Things that can go very wrong, but which in practice we may expect to be extremely rare are not necessarily large problems.
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.
> 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.
Only if the doctor felt that the treatment, not the illness, not the person, the treatment. Was against their moral beliefs.
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".
The doctor can prefuse to perform specific services, nothing in the bill permits then to refuse to treat specific people.
no it doesn't. it says that services can be denied based on moral objections. people are the ones that receive those services.
Policy invalid. Request denied. Good luck.
[That feels like that would be in the spirit of this bill]
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.
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?
And this bill doesn't change that long-established approach to medicine.
> 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.
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?
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.
> As of 1993, only 14% of medical oaths prohibited euthanasia, and only 8% prohibited abortion Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath#Modern_vers...
It is not rare to have people colloquially call these other forms of "the" oath many M.D. swear to the hippocratic oaths in my experience.
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.
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.