The bathroom directive was a feint for the HHS directive.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) finalized new transgender regulations for Obamacare on Friday.
These regulations threaten the religious liberty, freedom of conscience, and independent medical judgment of health care professionals. And, just as they did in the transgender school policy the Obama administration announced this morning, the administration has created these new Obamacare regulations by redefining “sex” to mean “gender identity.”
As Roger Severino and I explain in a Heritage Foundation report, these regulations will create serious conflicts of conscience for many organizations, hospitals, physicians, and other individuals involved in healthcare.
By prohibiting differential treatment on the basis of “gender identity” in health services, these regulations will penalize medical professionals and health care organizations that, as a matter of faith, moral conviction, or professional medical judgment, believe that maleness and femaleness are biological realities to be respected and affirmed, not altered or treated as diseases.
The regulations create special privileges based on gender identity that will lead to unreasonable and costly litigation for physicians, hospitals, insurers, and others involved in health care. They will effectively require controversial procedures, such as “sex-reassignment” surgery, that respected medical professionals argue have not been proven to be effective in treating serious mental health conditions. Rather than respect the diversity of opinions on sensitive and controversial health care issues, the proposed regulations endorse and enforce one view.
These new regulations go beyond what Congress established in Obamacare.