WASHINGTON — The American Psychological Association strongly criticized the administration’s proposal to halt enforcement of nondiscrimination requirements in Department of Health and Human Services grant rules, asserting that removing such protections will harm the most vulnerable populations.
“This move opens the door to taxpayer-funded discrimination by HHS grant recipients,” said Jaime “Jim” Diaz-Granados, PhD, APA’s deputy chief executive officer. “This proposal will, in essence, remove legal protections for populations that are most in need of them.”
According to the proposed ruleopens in new window, the department would no longer enforce nondiscrimination protections in HHS-funded grant programs based on classes that are not already explicitly protected by federal civil rights laws or specifically written into the law creating the grant. These classes could potentially include sex, disability, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity.
Women, people of color and sexual and gender minorities have reported experiencing discrimination when seeking medical care, according to a 2017 survey by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. For example, 32% of African Americans, 25% of Latinos and 16% of LGBT people reported experiencing discrimination when going to a doctor or health clinic, according to the survey.
Discrimination as a stressor has become more prevalent in recent years, rising from affecting 20% of the population in 2015 to 25% in 2018, according APA’s 2019 Stress in America Survey. That survey found that most people of color (63%) said that discrimination had hindered them from having a full and productive life, with a similar proportion of LGBT adults (64%) expressing the same sentiment. Research shows that discrimination by health care providers is tied to physical and mental health disparities in populations currently protected by nondiscrimination provisions.
This proposed rule would affect billions of dollars of health and social service programs, including adoption and foster care services, family preservation services, supportive housing services, maternal and child health and independent living centers.
”Grant-funded adoption and foster care agencies could refuse to work with LGBT potential foster or adoptive parents and could deny services to families who do not share the agency’s religious beliefs,” according to Diaz-Granados.
“This change could cause real harm by shrinking the availability of family placements and potentially causing more youth to age out of the system without a permanent family placement,” he said. “Weakening non-discrimination requirements is not consistent with HHS’s mission to enhance and protect the health and well-being of all Americans.”