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Health care providers, doctors and nurses shouldn’t have to choose between serving their patients or following their deeply held religious beliefs. Neither should patients be forced to pay for health care products and services that violate their faith.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) aggressively took up the task of persecuting people of faith during the Obama years by writing rules and regulations that nullify religious concerns regarding various "health care" services. Ironically these were supposed to prohibit discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, age and disability but the HHS directions made it clear that faith-based concerns over services like abortion or gender-altering surgery were not to be considered.
HHS’s most recent maneuverings now attempt to cement these rules by re-interpreting the definition of "on the basis of sex" to include "gender identity," and "termination of pregnancy." This action effectively requires doctors, nurses and other medical professionals to perform abortions, gender transition surgeries and other types of "gender-affirming care" against their consciences.
Religious Americans should be alarmed. These moves clearly reveal how HHS is dedicated to an all-out assault on faith-based individuals within the health care industry – dangerously intimating that there will soon be no place for conscientious Americans in mainstream health care.
FILE – Xavier Becerra, secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), speaks during a news conference at the HHS headquarters in Washington, D.C., US, on Tuesday, June 28, 2022. (Photographer: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Many have raised concerns over the Department’s obvious attempt to make the rules nearly universally applicable to health insurance. The rule’s preamble states that it would apply to any covered entity that "is principally engaged in the provision or administration of health programs or activities...including a health insurance issuer’s excepted benefits and short-term limited duration insurance products."
Faith-based hospitals, nursing homes, clinics would all fall under the umbrella of these mandates. A supposedly non-partisan government agency – HHS, will then be weaponized against them.
The rule would also likely apply to any health insurers receiving federal financial assistance, including subsidies, some third-party administrators, and healthcare providers through the Medicare Part B Program. Providers who receive payments from covered insurers will also become covered if the provider accepts Medicare or Medicaid payments.
BECERRA: FEDERAL GOV 'LOOKING INTO' HELPING WOMEN CROSS STATE LINES FOR ABORTIONS
In other words, the rule would force the majority of insurance companies to cover a host of medically harmful and morally objectionable "procedures" such as elective mastectomies, hysterectomies, breast augmentation, abortions and more. Ordinary taxpayers would foot the bill – many likely unknowingly – through their insurance and health plans.
FILE – Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra ((Shawn Thew/Pool via AP, File)
Additionally, these HHS efforts encourage other government agencies to follow a similar track and use their rules as a "template" for developing their own regulations that attack religious objections.
The Biden administration has promised Americans that the new HHS proposals won’t affect religious freedom, but these platitudes fall flat. HHS spent five years persecuting health care professionals and hospitals in Franciscan Alliance v. Becerra for not obeying a 2016 version of their rules which would have similarly required them to violate their religious beliefs and medical judgment.
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Even after a federal court granted the religious plaintiffs a permanent injunction against the rule, federal government and ACLU lawyers aggressively appealed the Court’s decision. So much for respecting the First Amendment.
The HHS’s relentless persecution of religious plaintiffs in Franciscan Alliance tellingly reveals the Biden administration is driven far more by political ideology than an earnest desire to prevent "discrimination." It also serves as a warning to religious medical professionals and insurers should the new rule become officially adopted.
What then, are conscientious Americans expected to do?
One option is notably not mentioned or constrained by the new rule: health sharing ministries (HCSMs). Free from the draconian and anti-religious constraints of the Affordable Care Act, HCSMs including Solidarity HealthShare, which I co-founded, are an ethical alternative to traditional health care that do not accept federal financial assistance from the HHS and therefore enable members to receive affordable high-quality care without compromising their conscience or religious beliefs.
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If HHS persists in its aggressive politicization of health care services for all Americans, they will rapidly drive millions of conscientious citizens out of the health care industry.
Sadly, that seems to be the mission. But thankfully, faith-affirming options like Solidarity HealthShare are there to welcome them with open arms.
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