Oregon Hospitals Didn t Have Shortages. So Why Were Disabled People Denied Care?
at 12:21 pm NPR
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, a small group of disability rights advocates found itself in a race against time to save the life of a woman with an intellectual disability.
The woman was taken to the hospital with COVID-19. But the hospital, in a small Oregon town, denied the ventilator she needed. Instead, a doctor, citing her low quality of life, wanted her to sign a legal form to allow the hospital to deny her care.
Out of that quiet fight in early spring, the advocates â staff at a disability rights legal group, a state lawmaker and a few others â discovered something disturbing: There were many cases in Oregon of health care being rationed to people with disabilities.
Oregon Hospitals Didn t Have Shortages. So Why Were Disabled People Denied Care?
Masks hang from an IV pole at a hospital.
Jenny Kane / AP
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, a small group of disability rights advocates found itself in a race against time to save the life of a woman with an intellectual disability.
The woman was taken to the hospital with COVID-19. But the hospital, in a small Oregon town, denied the ventilator she needed. Instead, a doctor, citing her low quality of life, wanted her to sign a legal form to allow the hospital to deny her care.
Masks hang from an IV pole at a hospital. Jenny Kane/AP
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, a small group of disability rights advocates found itself in a race against time to save the life of a woman with an intellectual disability.
The woman was taken to the hospital with COVID-19. But the hospital, in a small Oregon town, denied the ventilator she needed. Instead, a doctor, citing her low quality of life, wanted her to sign a legal form to allow the hospital to deny her care.
Out of that quiet fight in early spring, the advocates staff at a disability rights legal group, a state lawmaker and a few others discovered something disturbing: There were many cases in Oregon of health care being rationed to people with disabilities.
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As Hospitals Fear Being Overwhelmed By COVID-19, Do The Disabled Get The Same Access?
By Joseph Shapiro
December 14, 2020
On the morning of April 21, Sarah McSweeney woke up with a temperature of 103 degrees and it kept rising. Staff at her group home worried that the woman with multiple disabilities she couldn’t walk or speak words had contracted COVID-19. They got her into her bright pink wheelchair and hurried to the hospital, just a block down the street from the group home in Oregon City, Ore.
That afternoon, Heidi Barnett got a phone call from the doctor in the emergency room.