MASSIVEPKGO_CHUCK
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I think you're confusing morality with obligation.samhung said:Not true. If the pharmacy has a stated policy that it will not dispense certain types of medications, and as long as this standard is applied consistently, fairly and without exception, the pharmacist CAN refuse to fill a prescription. They are also free to refuse to fill prescriptions when they do not have the stock, if they are not a provider under whatever insurance plan is presented by the customer or for any other reason other than bias against any legally protected class. Just showing up with a prescription does not entitle you to the medication or even to consideration for having it filled. Just like there is a due process for civil and criminal court proceedings, so is there for any patientrofessional encounter in health care.
As long as the situation is not an emergency or life-threatening, any health care professional is free to refuse service to anyone. Just like a business can refuse to provide service, so can a health care provider. I can and have refused patients for many reasons, up to and including they way they have treated other physicians. No health care professional is obligated to be a punching bag, and I am equally permitted to notify a patient that I will no longer provide care to them. That is a very rare exception, but it does occur and there are very specific regulations (as there are for anything in health care) attached to that situation.
The fact remains is that the hpyothesises dealt in more moral issues than professional issues. A liscenced pharmacist's moral issues should NOT play any part in obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction or whatever souly predicated on the customer's marital status, unless the scrip was obtained illegally and not in the prescribing physician's handwriting. Then the pharmacist would have just cause to refuse to do it.
As to the ambulance driver, her moral views of abortion are immaterial when her job is to aid in taking others to the hospital for treatment. And as such they risk the patients life when her morality supercedes her professionalism.