Undermining Protections for LGBTQ Patients and Language Accessibility Requirements
The Trump administration is proposing to undermine strong and clear protections against discrimination in health care by giving health care providers, pharmacy benefit managers, and insurers a license to discriminate against LGBTQ people and many others. The existing rule implementing Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as the Health Care Rights Law, was promulgated by the Obama administration in 2016 after a rigorous six-year process. The rule characterized discrimination based on sex stereotyping and gender identity as impermissible sex discrimination under the law. It also prohibited insurance providers using the marketplace from discriminating against protected characteristics, provided strong language access and notice requirements, and established many other critical patient protections.
The Trump administration incorrectly claimed that an injunction against limited provisions of the rule necessitated promulgating a new rule, but the proposal’s expansive decimation of existing protections reveals that this is just the administration’s latest effort to undermine the ACA at the cost of patient care. In addition to erasing the existing regulation’s explicit protections for LGBTQ people, the proposed rule would also: Continue reading “Attack on the ACA”