Trump Releases Health Plan Allowing Providers to Refuse Transgender Treatment
By Slate. . .Trump’s HHS has been crafting this policy for years in an effort to exclude trans people from the Affordable Care Act’s Section 1557. That provision bars most health care providers and insurance companies from discriminating against patients on the basis of sex (among other things). It incorporates the definition of sex discrimination used in various civil rights laws, most notably Title IX, which applies to educational institutions. The Obama administration enacted a rule interpreting Section 1557 to protect transgender people, explaining that discrimination against a patient who transitions from one sex to another is, by definition, sex discrimination. But on the last day of 2016, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor issued a nationwide injunction blocking the rule, ruling that sex encompasses only “biological differences between males and females.” (Read more from “Trump Releases Health Plan Allowing Providers to Refuse Transgender Treatment” HERE)
______________________________________________________________
Trump Administration Rolls Back Health Care Protections for LGBTQ Patients
By Politico. The Trump administration today proposed to scrap an Obama-era policy that prohibited health care providers from discriminating against transgender patients, in its latest rollback of federal protections for transgender people. . .
HHS said it is repealing the Obama-era definition of sex protections in order to make its regulations “more consistent” with other agencies. The proposal, released on a Friday before holiday weekend, comes two days after the Department of Housing and Urban Developmentmoved to let federally funded homeless centers deny services to transgender people.
The Obama administration had issued a rule asserting that Obamacare’s nondiscrimination protections, Section 1557 of the law, covered gender identity. But a federal judge blocked those protections in 2016 following a lawsuit from religious groups. The Trump administration said it rewrote the rule in response to the court ruling.
However, the Trump proposal eliminates similar nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ patients that weren’t blocked by the court. The proposal also reaffirms the rights of health care workers to deny care based on a religious or moral objection, strengthening rules issued earlier this month by Trump’s health department. (Read more from “Trump Administration Rolls Back Health Care Protections for LGBTQ Patients” HERE)
Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE
