At midnight tonight the comments period ends to protest Obama’s plan to stop enforcing laws already in place to protect health care workers’ right of conscience.
Many good organizations have established online clearinghouses to help you properly write your comment to the Dept. of Health and Human Services so it will be accepted.
Here’s a great one: Send your comment (be you patient or professional) through Freedom2Care.org, and know it will get where it is supposed to go. F2C has already forwarded 45k emails.
F2C sponsored a press conference yesterday that got lots of press, which is good.
Unfortunately, the coverage mostly got the issue wrong, indicating this is about something new, when all President Bush did, which Obama will likely rescind, is add enforcement measures to conscience laws already in place. Here’s the regulation Obama is planning to overturn, according to F2C…

One of the main reasons the conscience regulation was implemented is that there was no systematic enforcement or education of the medical community of conscience-protecting civil rights laws.
Though the laws have technically been in effect for over 35 years, the laws remained relatively powerless, since health care providers remained uneducated about the issue and unaware of their legal rights and recourse.

The conscience regulation designated the Office of Civil Rights to receive complaints and oversee follow-up investigations. The regulation also required that federal HHS grant recipients impacted by these anti-discrimination laws certify to HHS their compliance with the laws.

F2C released polling data yesterday by Kellyanne Conway of The Polling Company.
The poll found 87% of American adults surveyed believed it is important to “make sure that healthcare professionals in America are not forced to participate in procedures and practices to which they have moral objections.”