Every day brings more outrageous decrees from Dear Leader as the so-called party of small government extends its reach ever farther. The following article is from The Guardian (a quite reliable source.)
VA hospitals remove politics and marital status from guidelines protecting patients from discrimination
Department of Veterans Affairs says the changes come in response to a Trump executive order ‘defending women’
The Department of Veterans Affairs has imposed new guidelines on VA hospitals nationwide that remove language that explicitly prohibited doctors from discriminating against patients based on their political beliefs or marital status.
The new rules, obtained by the Guardian, also apply to psychologists, dentists and a host of other occupations. They have already gone into effect in at least some VA medical centers.
Under federal law, eligible veterans must be given hospital care and services, and the revised VA hospital rules still instruct medical staff that they cannot discriminate against veterans on the basis of race, color, religion and sex. But language within VA hospital bylaws requiring healthcare professionals to care for veterans regardless of their politics and marital status has been explicitly eliminated from these bylaws, raising questions about whether individual workers could now be free to decline to care for patients based on personal characteristics not expressly protected by federal law.
Explicit protections for VA doctors and other medical staff based on their marital status, political party affiliation or union activity have also been removed, documents reviewed by the Guardian show.
The changes also affect chiropractors, certified nurse practitioners, optometrists, podiatrists, licensed clinical social workers and speech therapists.
In making the changes, VA officials cite Donald Trump’s 30 January executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”. The primary purpose of the executive order was to strip most government protections from transgender people. The VA has since ceased providing most gender-affirming care and forbidden a long list of words, including “gender affirming” and “transgender”, from clinical settings.
Somehow, I don't feel safer . . .
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