There isn’t a good count of either how many doctors harbor religious objections they’re not able to act on, or of how many patients get denied services by religiously objecting doctors. The most typical way medicine and religion tend to collide, these experts say, was for the sixth of all U.S. patients who are treated by Catholic health systems. Some of these hospitals don’t provide certain types of contraception, abortion, or assisted suicide. But those are hospitals, not the individual doctors and nurses who appear to be the main beneficiaries of the new HHS proposed rule.

“They’re setting up this office and using a lot of taxpayer dollars to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist,” Fogel says. “Health systems are already pretty good at accommodating people who have a genuine objection to participating in a service.”