Deep within the massive health-care overhaul legislation, a few little-noticed provisions have quietly reignited one of the bitterest debates in medicine: how to balance the right of doctors, nurses and other workers to refuse to provide services on moral or religious grounds with the right of patients to get care.
Advocates for protecting health workers argue the new law leaves vulnerable those with qualms about abortion, morning-after pills, stem cell research and therapies, assisted suicide and a host of other services. Proponents of patients’ rights, meanwhile, contend that, if anything, the legislation favors those who oppose some end-of-life therapies and the termination of pregnancies and creates new obstacles for dying patients and women seeking abortions.
Both sides acknowledge that the scope of any new conflicts that might arise under the legislation will become clear only as the implications of the overhaul unfold. But both agree that clashes are probably inevitable.
“It’s sort of the son of the ‘death panels,’ ” said Loren Lomasky, a University of Virginia professor of philosophy who studies conflicts of conscience in health care, referring to last summer’s controversy about end-of-life counseling. “This is a major transformation of the health-care system. And when this sort of thing happens, fissures can open up and you can fall into them if you’re not careful.”
Well, I hope that the balance of power will flip-flop from socialists to conservatives this November and that this rotten law will be repealed…with a veto proof majority.