On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to block New York state’s requirement that health care workers must be vaccinated against COVID-19. For home-based care providers, the move is unlikely to change much for now – either in New York or elsewhere.
A similar challenge in the state of Maine had previously reached the Supreme Court, with the same outcome. A handful of other states have been operating with mandates for some time as well.
“I am not surprised by this outcome,” Emina Poricanin, managing attorney of the New York-based Poricanin Law, told Home Health Care News in an email. “The fate of Maine’s challenge to the Supreme Court foretold this outcome for New York. By this point, due to the Second Circuit’s decision refusing to grant an injunction, health care providers in the state have gone ahead and enforced the mandate – without religious accommodations. Thus, this decision will have little practical impact on providers.”
The Supreme Court decision was under an emergency application, so there was less reasoning provided than usual.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, however, did offer commentary in his dissent, explaining that “thousands” of health care workers should have a right to forgo vaccination due to religious beliefs. Without that exception, those individuals could lose their jobs and right to unemployment benefits, he explained.
Because there was no full written conclusion, it is difficult to see exactly how the ruling could affect national mandates from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
“This ruling does not mean the Biden Administration’s mandates for health care workers, employees of federal contractors, or employers with over 100 employees will find similar favor at the highest court,” Keith Wilkes, a partner at Hall Estill, said in a statement shared with HHCN. “The legal challenge for those federal mandates is far different, focusing on whether the federal administrative agencies issuing the mandates exceeded their rule-making authority under federal law. In the past, the Supreme Court has kept a close eye on government overreach by administrative agencies.”
There are other interesting takeaways as well.
It seems, for example, that the courts are giving much more weight to medical exemptions than religious ones, Angelo Spinola, the co-chair of the home health and home care industry group at the law firm Polsinelli, told HHCN in an email.
“This ruling effectively means that the majority of justices believe that the states have the right to require coronavirus vaccinations as a condition of employment without allowing for the same religious exemptions that we see under some federal laws like Title VII,” Spinola said. “In other words, the majority believe that [a] state government’s right to take measures to protect health care workers and patients from COVID trump the right of health care workers’ to refuse to become vaccinated based on a religious objection and continue to work.”
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