The House passed a bill on Tuesday that seeks to end the vaccine mandate for employees at some health facilities, marking the first pandemic-related bill the Republican majority has approved since taking control of the chamber.<\/p>\n
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The legislation, titled The Freedom for Health Care Workers Act, passed in a 227-203 vote, with seven Democrats joining Republicans in passing the bill.<\/p>\n
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The measure, introduced by Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), would stop the Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary from enforcing workplace regulations and standards enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic \u2014 including the vaccine mandate \u2014 at Medicare and Medicaid-certified facilities.<\/p>\n
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Under the rules, health workers at Medicare and Medicaid-certified facilities are required to have at least their first dose in a primary series of coronavirus vaccinations in order to provide care, treatment or services. More than 10 million health industry workers across roughly 76,000 facilities are subject to the vaccine requirements.<\/p>\n
Not forever:\u00a0<\/strong>As OSHA noted back in 2021, Medicare interim final rules such as the vaccine requirement expire three years after they are issued unless they are finalized.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The House passed a bill on...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56257"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56258,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56257\/revisions\/56258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}