Compassion & Choices Calls for Repeal of Bush Administration Move to Undercut End-of-Life Care and Choice

Compassion & Choices calls on the Obama Administration to repeal last-minute regulations allowing denial of medical services based on health care worker religious beliefs.

Compassion & Choices, the leading nonprofit organization working to improve patients’ end of life care and choices, today called for repeal of regulations adopted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

These regulations would allow individual health care workers to deny medical care to patients based on the worker’s religious or moral beliefs. “It is appalling that patients suffering from cancer or other terminal diseases would have their medical choices restricted based on a health care worker’s individual religious beliefs,” said Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Compassion & Choices. “We call upon the Obama Administration to repeal this ill-advised regulatory expansion. While on their way out the door, these administration officials tied a knot in the pipeline that provides information and care to those facing the end of life. The incoming Administration should repeal this regulation.”           

Compassion & Choices Director of Legal Affairs Kathryn Tucker said the regulation would harm patients facing the end of life. “Although the regulation purports to be aimed at simply enforcing current law, it goes much further,” said Tucker. “The regulation removes a Health Care Entity employee’s obligation to inform patients of all of their treatment options or to refer patients to other providers if those patients request treatment options with which the employee does not personally agree. The very notion of denying patients access to any such information violates fundamental healthcare principles of autonomy and informed consent.”

Tucker said the Bush Administration’s regulation “is particularly worrisome for patients at the end of life who are often unaware of their options, hesitant to initiate conversations with their providers about certain of those options, and often unable to remove themselves from their current health care setting in order to seek treatment elsewhere. When dying patients are suffering in the final stages of terminal illnesses, they should be able to receive counseling on a full range of options. This thereby empowers them to make fully informed medical care decisions, including the legal and medically accepted options of refusing life- prolonging interventions, opiate pain management, palliative sedation, and voluntary stopping eating and drinking (VSED).”

Tucker’s analysis shows that the proposed regulation “takes a step in the wrong direction, empowering Health Care Providers to refuse to discuss certain options, such as forgoing treatment, aggressive pain management, palliative sedation, and/or VSED and—even more disconcerting—to refuse to refer patients who affirmatively seek those or other options to another healthcare provider. The regulation, therefore, only serves to exaggerate the already significant problem with the quality of patients’ end-of-life experiences throughout the United States.

The regulation would exaggerate an already significant problem by empowering Health Care Professionals, including those at the bedside, who have personal moral or religious beliefs opposing aggressive pain care, regardless of professional norms or the patient’s requests.” To offer just one example, Tucker said, “the regulation would also empower Health Care Professionals who decide that a patient has no chance of recovery to unilaterally refuse to provide life-prolonging interventions such as artificial respiration or feeding tubes.”

Read the Compassion and Choices call for the repeal of last-minute regulations allowing denial of medical services based on health care worker religious beliefs.