Before a recent hospital visit, Christine Link requested that her healthcare providers wear masks because of her autoimmune disease and medications that further suppress her immune system. A phlebotomist initially refused her request, leaving her feeling “shocked, scared.”
Escalating her concern to the Mass General Brigham’s patient advocacy office, she received this response: “While the request by a patient to an employee to wear a mask is not an ADA-related accommodation, it is a patient-centered and trauma informed best practice, and we encourage patients to make this request with the provider who is ordering the testing. The provider would determine if it would be in the patients’ best interest clinically to have staff wear a mask while interacting with the patient. Then they would need to communicate the decision to all staff providing services to the patient, such as phlebotomy staff.”
The patient advocate’s response left Link feeling, “foolish for thinking that Mass General Brigham would actually care enough to follow the law regarding reasonable accommodations. Instead I was gaslit about my needs.” She added, “Each time I have an in-person appointment, I have to go through being made to feel as less than any other human being as a result of my disabilities, bullied, and forced into unsafe care as a condition of getting the healthcare I need.”
Link is not alone. She is one of the many patients who reached out to tell me about how the refusal of this simple ADA accommodation is ruining their lives. One of the most worrisome bits of fallout is that many patients now fear they will get Covid-19 in the hospital or medical office. They are delaying getting medical care, including cancer screening and infusions of drugs, putting off vital appointments. This risks seriously damaging their health.
Fuck this piece of shit country.
May as well say “the provider would determine if it would be in the patients best interest clinically to have the staff wash their hands”
Fuck this evil, rotten country, and fuck Joe Biden for being personally, individually responsible for this nightmare. Trump was the harm reduction candidate, Biden is Pestilence itself.
Trump is only the harm reduction candidate if you're a white cis het person.
There is no harm reduction candidate.
To be more clear about what I mean by this since what I said was really reductive, Trump is the “harm reduction candidate” solely because of how the liberals react to him and makes them kind of sometimes do what we tell them.
Trump tries to be 100% Hitler and makes the liberals mad and only manages to do 50% of his Hitlering. Biden tries to be 95% Hitler and succeeds while the liberals cheer him on and the conservatives start demanding 120% Hitler.
liberals are absolutely useless though. it doesn't matter if they're more "politically engaged" under a Republican because all they end up doing is hijacking and co-opting our movements. Both parties are just picking different sets of marginalized people to attack so they can keep the money flowing into the bourgeoisie's pockets so I don't see any harm reduction happening anywhere.