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Florida health care can now be denied based on moral, ethical, religious beliefs
- monksy 4y agoSo does this mean you can deny medical care to those who support this bill? [That feels like that would be in the spirit of this bill]
- ledauphin 4y agoI suppose if: 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.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago> in other words your religion establishes that certain beliefs make you an unperson. 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?
- ledauphin 4y agoDoctors literally do this all the time. This is part of what it means to be a doctor. ER surgeons don't get to know whether the patient is a "good guy or a bad guy" before they save the patient's life. And this bill doesn't change that long-established approach to medicine.
- slater 4y agoThe hippocratic oath, well-known to have always come with an asterisk pointing to a 20-page EULA
- George83728 4y agoAre you sure you're talking about the right oath? > [...] 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.
- throw101010 4y agoMost medical schools apply modern versions, most of which do not forbid abortion and are more secular than the original Greek oath. > 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_versions_and_relevance 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.
- jmclnx 4y agoSo, if I was a Dr., and a supporter of this law came under my care for a serious condition, could I throw him out of my office because of my religious beliefs
- ledauphin 4y agoThis bill allows providers to exclude forms of medical care across all patients, not persons of specific types.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y agoFrankly I’m very skeptical of the language of the bill. I can’t really think of a specific medical procedure that can be broadly blanket banned on religious grounds that doesn’t come off as extreme or discriminatory: even if one is against abortion, helping to expel a dead fetus is the exact same medical procedure. Even if one is against hormone replacement therapy for trans people, the process of assisting low-testosterone men or menopausal women is the same prescriptions. 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?
- ledauphin 4y agoI'm very confused by your comment - where does the language of the bill say anything about _banning_ medical procedures? And do you get the impression that there are a lot of (or any) doctors in Florida qualified to expel dead fetuses who would prefer to refuse that medical procedure? Or is this just a very detailed straw man?
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago> And do you get the impression that there are a lot of (or any) doctors in Florida qualified to expel dead fetuses 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!
- ars 4y agoThe title and article aren't quite telling you the truth. 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.
- toyg 4y agoMy beliefs are that felons are unredeemable and undeserving of any care provision whatsoever. Hence, "just those specific services" becomes all health care. 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.
- AbrahamParangi 4y agoThis analysis of "what's the worst that could happen" is insufficient as the appropriate test is "what's the worst that could happen and how often could it happen" Things that can go very wrong, but which in practice we may expect to be extremely rare are not necessarily large problems.
- toyg 4y agoThey are still problems. They can be somewhat neutered when they clearly go against the spirit of the law. Unfortunately, this is not the case here: since the spirit of the law is effectively to move decisive power from patient to doctor on grounds of personal and un-objective opinions, aberrations fit pretty nicely inside it. 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.
- ledauphin 4y agothis bill does not allow exclusion of medical care based on your beliefs about the patient, but based on your beliefs about the medical care in question. [It is deeply weird how uncurious the comments on this particular article are.]
- Kosecant 4y ago[flagged]
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoCompelled service with compensation still exists: Jury duty, contractual relationships (e.g. military stop-loss policies). What this does is eliminate a particular contractual compulsion.
- ledauphin 4y agointeresting you bring up jury duty and military service, both of which have longstanding religious conscience exemptions.
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoOnly because it's the government imposing them, and the government (not private sector) is constitutionally forbidden from interfering with religious exercise.
- sirsinsalot 4y agoI think that medical professionals should be paid to administer treatment to human beings, regardless of the situation. It is a human. They should be all treated the same unless the patient requests. To do anything else is immoral rot. What next, denial of treatment to someone you don't like? Or someone who committed a crime? Sorry, I don't treat shoplifters, your cancer is God telling you that you did wrong America has gone loony.
- ledauphin 4y agoI have to imagine you're more capable of having a serious philosophical discussion than this sounds. There is a huge difference between offering to treat only those whom you like, and offering to do only the types of procedures you believe are "good". We have rightly outlawed the former for many categories of supposed goodness/badness. But forcing people to start performing new treatments that are the societal cause du jour that would not previously have been part of their job description is quite arguably federalized slavery. The goalposts will never stop shifting, so either swear eternal and unwavering fealty to the state or go find a different job? It's quite rich when a forum of techies who mostly can find a well-paying job doing almost nothing of lasting value for anyone can find time to judge medical professionals who improve people's health on a daily basis because of a difference of opinion about the job description of those healthcare professionals.
- detaro 4y agobill text: https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/1580/BillText/er/HTML https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/1580/BillText/er/...
- egypturnash 4y agoI am looking forwards to seeing what happens when every insurance company operating in Florida suddenly gets a new religion that just so happens to conflict with paying out any money. I think there's ample precedent in most insurance company's actions to "determine such beliefs by reference to the entities’ governing documents; any published ethical, moral, or religious guidelines or directives; mission statements; constitutions; articles ofincorporation; bylaws; policies; or regulations".
- sirsinsalot 4y agoI'm sorry, we don't insure anyone who isn't straight, Christian, has a criminal record or who are in a mixed race marriage. Policy invalid. Request denied. Good luck.
- gfodor 4y agoCertainly it's debatable if doctors should be able to deny treatments they think aren't harmful but they see as religiously offensive. But the root disagreement here is primarily about harm, and we already have agreed as a society that doctors have a duty to not knowingly harm their patients. If you can frame something as a civil rights issue, that can help resolve some conflicts but doesn't do much in terms of resolving contentions around if a specific procedure is harmful to a patient or not. In medicine, it does simply boil down to either persuading physicans that the procedure isn't harmful, or determining as a society we will no longer accredit people as physicians if they believe it is harmful.
- ledauphin 4y agoIf there's anyone left in the comment section now that this has been flagged and consigned to the outer darkness... 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.
- positron6000 4y agolmao jesus christ - "being gay or a minority and seeking medical care is the same as drone striking a wedding, actually." keep it classy, hn.
- toyg 4y agoThe only "objectionable" therapy, out there in the real world, is abortion. Roe vs Wade is from 1973, literally 50 years ago. That means any doctor who graduated before RvW is now well past retirement age, and so is under no obligation to administer anything. 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.