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February 28, 2012 12:53 AM UTC

GOP Senators Proving Godwin's Law Accurate

  • 33 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

The AP’s Kristen Wyatt reports:

Hospitals with religious objections to procedures such as abortions would have to tell patients in a special notice Colorado’s Senate approved Friday.

The measure was approved over vigorous objections from Senate Republicans, who called the notification bill a thinly veiled attempt to stigmatize religious hospitals…

The bill’s sponsor, Democratic Sen. Morgan Carroll of Aurora, said the notices are needed because hospital consolidations can confuse patients about where to get certain services.

“It’s really about a patient’s right to know,” Carroll said.

Republicans strongly objected to Carroll’s proposal, which passed on a narrow voice vote. Some compared the requirements to the religious labeling used in Nazi Germany. [Pols emphasis]

As anyone who has ever gone to the emergency room knows, the first thing a patient gets upon arrival is a clipboard full of forms and disclosures the patient is required to complete and acknowledge. Senate Bill 12-093 would require hospitals that refuse services due to religious objections to provide a notification of that, along with privacy policies and other notifications routinely given to every patient “as soon after admission as practicable.”

Having listened to the audio of Sen. Ted Harvey’s shrieking comparisons of this bill to “Communist Vietnam” Friday, Sen. Kevin Lundberg’s repeated statements that the bill would force hospitals to “wear a patch on their clothes,” and Sen. Shawn Mitchell’s follow-up about “emblems” not successfully affirming rights of “religious groups to live in a country in Europe,” we can say it was really unmistakably obvious what Republicans were getting at.

But we’re happy to report that the endless references to communists and Nazis and ghettoes and patches on clothes eventually became too much to take, even for fellow GOP Sen. Ellen Roberts–who nonetheless opposed the bill. With this caveat:

I must distance myself from references to stars and ghettoes. I do not in any way equate this to what has happened in our, uh, global history, to those of Jewish faith, and what the Holocaust was about.

Thank goodness one of them didn’t go there, right?

Comments

33 thoughts on “GOP Senators Proving Godwin’s Law Accurate

  1. Then patients could actually decide on the care they want, not some guy in a funny hat who lives in a foreign country thousands of miles away. It’s not at all clear to me why Republicans think this is a good thing when they shriek about government-run, single-payer health care.

  2. … That if they need an abortion, for any reason, they are in the wrong hospital seems to be an important bit of information to convey.

    It in no way rates as religious persecution, however paranoid (or cynical) our friends in the GOP may be.

  3. Do you have any responses to the objections from Republicans, including Sen. Roberts, or are you stopping at you faked outrage?

    Sen. Roberts agreed with EVERYTHING her colleagues said. She said so even while she demurred from some of their analogies. Where is your commentary on the ISSUE?

    It’s not about the issue, is it?

        1. is akin to a sign in your window.  Not hyperbolic or exaggerated at all.  That really is going ” to help their colleagues understand “.

          You are so full of shit.  

        2. the entire point of the original story was that the “analogy from history” employed by the Republicans “to help their colleagues understand” – LOL, do you really seriously believe the utter crap you write? – was extremely offensive and over the top.

          You can start your own thread or diary on the issue of whether hospitals should or should not be required to disclose to prospective patients that they will not perform certain procedures simply due to their religious affiliation. (Shouldn’t they be PROUD of that fact? Why are they trying to hide it?) This thread has to do with the GOP’s utterly tasteless dragging of the Holocaust into what should be a rather routine issue.

    1. In fact, this whole religious exemption thing is getting ridiculous.

      I’m waiting for the day a Scientologist sets up shop as a pharmacist, or a Christian Scientist sets up as a doctor.  That way you can go to them and be denied all medical care and offered the “compassionate” faith-based alternative.  And in our rush to right-wing idiocy, we’ll condemn anyone who objects and pity the practitioner who refuses to perform any services that would normally fall under his or her field.

      In the meantime, this is a simple disclosure – less intrusive in fact than the mandatory ultrasounds that the Radical Right Reactionaries now favor.

        1. The common-law definition of rape is penetration without consent.  How do you justify state-mandated rape, whether or not it causes any harm?  Or put another way, why is rape a crime if some rapes, as you suggest, harm no one?

          I am astonished that the same folks who insist that the government cannot require a woman to pay for insurance insist that she can be required to be penetrated against her will.

        2. forcing then to undergo medically invasive and unnecessary procedures, or having  political propaganda forced on them in the guise of medical information to make their own decisions. Women are guaranteed the right to an abortion in the first trimester, period, and don’t need  politicians to “inform” them. That’s what their doctors are for, to explain medical  risks v benefits, not to impose a particular political agenda.  Procedures or required propaganda scripts for purely political reasons have no place in the doctor/patient interface.  

          If you don’t think abortion ought to be legal, work to have Roe v Wade over-turned.  As long as it stands, decisions about this perfectly legal and constitutionally protected medical procedure are none of any politician’s business.

          And, by the way, most women , including the most liberal, aren’t crazy about the idea of having abortions in the first place and the most effective way to bring down the abortion rate is with a healthy economy, widespread access to safe and effective birth control in particular and quality health care in general, none of which seems to be of any interest to today’s GOP.

        3. An ultrasound for a woman considering an abortion, so that she may make an informed choice, harms no one.

          . . .  a disclosure notice from the hospital harms no one, and permits an informed choice.  Si, what’s your problem?

          You’re intellectually pathetic. You should stick with shilling for RMoney, that way when you’re so obviously logically inconsistent you can be certain that you’re espousing at least one of his many recent self-conflicting opinions.

    2. ArapaGOP represents the Republican Party. This is what they believe. This is what the Republicans want to do.

      The long Republican Primary is doing a great job of demonstrating and publicizing all the crazy ideas and kooks. They hate freedom, they hate science, they hate the middle class, they hate women (or at least women’s sexuality).

  4. Why not require every facility to list the services available, the services not available, and the nearest facilities that offer the unavailable services?

    1. … in the fevered minds of some, publishing the nearest facilities that offer the unavailable services would be tantamount to committing accessory to murder.

      And unfortunately, I am not kidding.

    2. during an admission process but whether or not a hospital provides the usual expected services or makes very glaring exceptions on religious ground is one of those things that people really do need to know up front.  Consolidations do make it hard to keep track of who exactly is running a hospital or group of hospitals.  

      It seems imminently reasonable and in the interests of all concerned, including hospitals who don’t wish to provide certain services. It spares them the hassle of dealing with patients who don’t realize that those services won’t be available. The hospital shouldn’t want those patients any more than those patients are going to want to be in that type of hospital.

      And there is nothing wrong with requiring hospitals who refuse perfectly legal procedures and services to be expected to inform patients of the limitations they place have in place and refer them to other hospitals that will meet their needs.  Where are the grounds for hysteria and comparisons to Vietnam?

      There is also nothing wrong with expecting insurers to cover all legal procedures and services deemed by a client’s doctor to be necessary for the health of the client. Pharmacies outside of religious hospitals also ought to be required to fill all legally obtained prescriptions. Pharmacists who don’t feel they can do that ought to be in another line of work because filling legally obtained prescriptions is the job.

      Those who oppose a particular war or war in general certainly don’t get to hang on to the portion of  their tax dollars that go to fund wars. That’s because there is no constitutional right to moral exceptions in all situations.

  5. Every TRAP bill (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) ever proposed (Colorado’s last go-round was before there was a D on any branch of government, and Ramey Johnson had a seat on HEWI) required any physician’s office that performed more than x number of abortions a month to clearly post that information, as well as mandated counselling regarding abortion IN THE WAITING ROOM, and everywhere else an abortion patient might see it making them aware of any number of things that pearl-clutching anti-choice legislators think those patients need to know.

    Never mind that this would advertise to all patients of that doctors’ office that other women were accessing their constitutional right to this legal medical procedure.  If some of those patients chose to take their healthcare elsewhere in objection, that would just be an unintended (yeah right!) consequence of more information available to patients.  Then those same pearl-clutchers gripe that Planned Parenthood does a huge portion of the abortions in this country.

    Similarly, Democrats in pro-choice locales have tried (thus far unsuccessfully) to make Crisis Pregnancy Centers explicitly post guidelines of what services they do and do not provide in their public areas.

    What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and neither of them are Nazis.

    1. I have to say that Sen. Carroll has finally introduced a bill that I find needed and agree with.  I know I’m a big critic, but I’d like to know when I’m going into the hospital at the end of my life that the hospital will have to let me and my family know that they won’t pull the plug.

  6. One thing the AP reporter left out is that medical services implicated are for a great deal more than abortion.

    With the recent trend of (1) hospital mergers; (2) increased religious ownership that comes with religious directives on medical care that is prohibited, patients will not be able to get access to tubal ligations, vasectomies, HIV counseling, compliance with certain end-of-life directives,etc.

    Basically the point is that if they have a right not to provide the services, the patient should have a right to know what services they refuse and that they have a right to get those medical services elsewhere.

    1. This is a good bill and a good idea considering the amount of services that are potentially involved and could be denied, including the ones you mentioned as well as same sex partners having visitation rights.  

      This is about patients’ rights and their right to be informed about what treatment they can and cannot expect at the facility they are using.

      The Nazi references are just…insane. I can’t even figure out how anyone gets to that conclusion and frankly, don’t much care anymore what upsets the GOP.

      Just keep fighting the good fight, Senator Carroll.  

    2. However, isn’t it the case that a hospital that refuses to honor last requests or transfer a patient could be sued.  I’d really like to sue some of these hopsitals for every dime they’ve got.

    3. Basically the point is that if they have a right not to provide the services, the patient should have a right to know what services they refuse and that they have a right to get those medical services elsewhere.

  7. Making hospitals list the services they provide akin to attacking yellow stars to Jews’ chests.

    Forcing pregnant women to undergo ultrasound tests they don’t need and then forcing the doctors to mark down in the women’s files for no medical reason whether or not they watched the ultrasound images, that’s just sound public policy rooted in individual equality and freedom.

    And, whoo-boy, talk about religious objections? Male lawmakers forcing doctors to perform procedures they don’t believe are necessary and then proscribing, literally scripting, how the interaction with patients should go…. that’s liberty! Why not put that proposal up for the almighty vote of the people?    

    Can you imagine the asinine college papers these GOPers turned in when they were students? Insupportable theses argued in strident tones with absurd reference to history, like a Monty Python sketch mocking faux-learned pretension.  

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