The rule empowers federal health officials to pull funding from more than 584,000 hospitals, clinics, health plans, doctors' offices and other entities if they do not accommodate employees who refuse to participate in care they find objectionable on personal, moral or religious grounds.
Alright, somebody gimme a frakkin' break! (Yeah, Yeah. I'm a BSG fan...)
One of the most fundamental rights we have as free citizens is the right to choose where we work, and what kind of work we choose to do. Naturally, this line of thought might lead us to understand that such matters are not just limited to 'health care'.
So, this would seem to lead most reasonable people (there's that term again) inexorably (cough, cough) towards the perspective that while an individual may indeed choose *what work* they wish to perform as their life's trade and *where* they wish to perform that trade, these freedoms *logically* extend also to those individuals (and businesses as 'members' of the community) who are employers. Employers alone decide what services they will or will not provide, and that the employee is *not* inherently privileged to make that decision after they've accepted employment with any given institution or organization.
Forgive the analogy, but it is unlikely that a vegan employee could simply refuse to serve the burger that every customer has a reasonable right to expect at McDonald's because it offends their moral or religious values. If a care facility offers particular procedures, then EVERY employee hired should be obliged to deliver those services as a reasonable condition of employment in that organization.
Mind you, this perspective still does not enable an employer to discriminate in hiring based upon those values of the potential employee except to the extent that those values would render the applicant unlikely to perform the duties of the job; but any legislation addressing this issue should insure that businesses retain the right to require standards of performance standards predicated upon the needs of the business. A business should not have to stop performing a service because it hired someone suddenly unwilling to perform. The onus should be upon the employee to understand the employer's expectations and their ability to meet them before undertaking employment. Or quit.
Last time I checked, an individual's religious and moral freedoms didn't extend to enabling them with control over their employer's right to determine the services they will provide as a business. If a worker's values are inconsistent with any given business' expressed plan, their freedoms should simply extend to their right to choose to work elsewhere.
So, if the government wants to 'protect' the rights of the individual, let them also make sure they don't trample the rights of employers to determine the scope of their business, and their right to meet the needs of their chosen customers. Pulling funding legislatively like this is religious and moral extortion by the government, based upon the values of a questionable majority of control, and is grossly ill advised.
The regulation, which would cost more than $44 million to implement, was aimed at enforcing several federal laws that have been on the books since the 1970s and were aimed primarily at protecting doctors and nurses who did not want to perform abortions in the wake of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, (Health and Human Services Secretary) Leavitt said.
Time to watch both Obama and McCain on this one. And prompt your own legislator to amend this piece of legislation accordingly.
No comments:
Post a Comment