What do you all think of this?
http://www.michiganlegislature.org/m...e=2003-HB-5006
http://www.michiganlegislature.org/m...e=2003-HB-5276
I'm not sure how I feel about the idea in general, but I think there are a lot of problems that need to be looked at. Aside from various oaths doctors may take*, they need to take the availability of care into consideration. At least in Iowa, insurance companies often give you a short list of doctors to choose from, and there can be lots of hoops to jump through if you want to switch doctors. It can be very bad in some fields, like mental health, which isn't covered all that well anyway.
Second, I have a bit of a problem with doctors at public hospitals doing this - if they're being paid by public money, I don't think they should be able to refuse care to a taxpayer, especially since (in Iowa at least, from what I understand) the county hospitals provide a lot of services to lower income folks.
Some news stories:
http://www.365gay.com/newscon04/04/042204MichMed.htm
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=13224
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/116/41.0.html
*The Hippocratic Oath was brought up as an argument against this law somewhere else. Not all doctors take the Hippocratic Oath, and almost none take an unmodified one, so this may vary from doctor to doctor, but since the oath they took was probably in line with their moral beliefs as a doctor, I don't know how much it matters.
http://www.imagerynet.com/hippo.ama.html
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