Civil Rights Protection for Discrimination: Recent Developments i0n the HHS Office of Civil Rights

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Originally aired on March 8, 2018 1:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. EDT

On January 18, 2018, the Trump Administration announced a new division of the HHS Office for Civil Rights focused on the rights of health care providers to determine or deny care depending on the provider’s religious conviction. The following day, HHS issued a proposed rule to broaden the scope of existing laws that permit denials to care, and grant OCR new outreach, investigative, and enforcement authority to ensure that federal funding recipients defer to providers’ personal and institutional beliefs over patients' needs. How are these developments likely to affect patients’ ability to obtain necessary health care? Is this new policy likely to have particular impacts on vulnerable communities such as transgender people, women and people of color? Does the new policy strike an appropriate balance between the rights of patients and the rights of providers? Our panel of experts discusses the new division and rule in depth and offer their views of what appear to be expanded protection for health care refusals.

Moderator: Kira Shepherd, Racial Justice Program, Public Rights/Private Conscience Project, Columbia Law School

Panelists:
Jennifer C. Pizer, Law and Policy Director, Lambda Legal
Susan Berke Fogel, Director, Reproductive Health, NHeLP
Jamille Fields, Planned Parenthood Federation of America