re: Supreme Court Blocks Biden's Vaccine Mandate

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My question to you is... Do you know anything about exactly who and what the Healthcare Workers mandate will affect?

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I don’t know anything about it. From posts above it appears that CMS is requiring it in only certain types
of facilities - but I do absolutely no work in this area, so I wouldn't be able to answer that. The court basically found that Medicare’s statute gave CMS the authority to mandate the vaccine in places accepting Medicare to protect patients. The mechanics of how this is administered and enforced - I dont know.

So Your question did make me think - and if your practice has an Atty it regularly uses- I would definitely ask him or her. Here’s why: I’m not sure how they enforce the penalty (which I’m assuming is either a fine or loss of Medicare dollars or both), but more significantly how CMS plans to track who is vaxxed and who isn’t vaxxed bc if religious exemptions.

Think about it. In order for the mandate to be workable, it would have to have some penalty or enforcement mechanism, or it’s not really a mandate, just a suggestion.

Theoretically your practice could just turn down Medicare patients and the mandate wouldn’t apply. But what are you going to do? Not see patients over 65? So the question begging to be answered is how does Medicare know in the first place whether the staff at any one practice has religious exemptions in order to measure compliance. Do they intend to audit this? Are they independently judging sincerity of them? What?

Is CMS ok with drs who own their hospitals or practices filling out a religious exemption form and granting it to themselves?.

I would DEFINITELY ask a healthcare atty about this. It would be worth it to know for your practice how to document and track the exemption requests, and determine whether you could just exempt yourself.