[ Wednesday, January 10, 2024 ]
OCR Lies. I usually have good things to say about OCR. For the most part, it's full of good people trying to do good things, and the investigators are probably the nicest enforcement people in the entire government: they really want to help healthcare providers get better and often give the benefit of the doubt to healthcare workers who are really trying to do the right thing but don't always get it right.
But whenever the Xavier Becerra hack-machine gets involved, you can count on things going off the rails, and yesterday brought a sterling example.
It is an indisputable fact that good people can disagree on abortion, but it's equally indisputable that people who believe abortion is murder should not be forced to participate in performing abortions. But it happens, or at least it did prior to a 2019 rule from HHS threatening hospitals with removal of federal funding for forcing objecting employees to participate in abortions or other acts that violate their legitimate religious beliefs.
Yesterday, HHS, through OCR, rescinded that rule. I guess you could quibble that the rule might have given employees too much leeway to refuse to do legitimate work that shouldn't be objectionable, or that full removal of federal funding was too big a penalty, and a $100,000 or $1 million fine would do the trick. But rescinding it entirely?
And even worse, bragging that REMOMING those conscience protections is actually INCREASING them? Here's the header of OCR's press release:
And here's the headline and lede of an article in The Hill, which is certainly left-leaning:
Jeff [9:26 AM]
