"HHS's Proposed Rule Pays Lip Service to Addressing the Climate Crisis"

HHS vomits up a pretend regulation to mitigate healthcare's massive carbon pollution.

Yesterday “Stat News” published my latest, my 25th, climate-related healthcare policy essay, at:  https://www.statnews.com/2024/05/20/hhs-proposed-rule-lip-service-addressing-climate-crisis/.

I conclude by writing:

In Judge Josephine Staton’s 2020 dissent in Juliana v. United States, a case in which 21 children alleged the government “willfully ignored” the dangers of burning of fossil fuels, she concluded that “never before has the U.S. confronted an existential threat that has not only gone unremedied but is actively backed by the government.” Though “the government accepts as fact that the U.S. has reached a [climate] tipping point crying out for a concerted response,” she wrote, the government “insists it has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the nation.”

Should HHS affirm Judge Staton’s opinion and finalize the proposed inpatient hospital rule’s decarbonization initiative, its only legitimate purpose will be to serve as an example of what historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt defined as the “banality of evil.” CMS will have propagated a business-as-usual regulatory rule so thoughtless, divorced from reality, and depraved it cannot be, as Arendt phrased, “an expression of anyone’s conscience.” Such a policy could only be crafted by a bureaucracy whose functionaries have mastered the art of not looking.

If HHS chooses to address the incalculable misery and suffering resulting from health care’s massive carbon footprint by allowing a small fraction of hospitals to voluntarily report their emissions for a few years, the country will have assuredly reached an Illichian tipping point where health care constitutes what theologian and social critic Ivan Illich defined as “a sick making enterprise” and a “major threat to health.