It's. About. Time.

[hummingwolf]

The White House on Thursday released a statement by Obama instructing his Health and Human Services secretary to draft rules requiring hospitals that receive Medicare and Medicaid payments to grant all patients the right to designate people who can visit and consult with them at crucial moments.The designated visitors should have the same rights

Comments

[historychick49]

It's about damn time.

I'm glad to see, too, that not only is sexual orientation included, but also gender identity.

[hummingwolf]

That too.

I just... I cannot get my mind around the mentality of people who think that barring certain people from visiting hospital patients who want to see them is ever a good thing. People are already complaining, of course, that this is Obama "pandering to special interest groups"--but the thing is that everyone who will ever be in or ever care about someone in an American hospital is a member of that "special interest group".

[hasufin]

I think a good part of it is laziness - family gets visitation, nobody else, and no need to ever ask a patient's opinion on anything. There is, as I'm sure you're aware, a lot of inertia in the medical system.

PLus, of course, it's yet one more point where certain authoritarians can get their hackles up. After all, if you force people to be with their "real" families then they'll see the light, get back on the straight and narrow, and stop it with all this gay stuff or not talking to their bio-family or whatever and become all nice and traditional again.

Actually, most of what I've been seeing about this has been the typical commentary about how it's too little, and the Obama administration needs to go all the way with gay rights.

[flewellyn]

It is too little, and the Obama administration does need to go all the way with gay rights.

Still, it is a step.

[hummingwolf]

Yeah, but medical inertia needs a kick in its ass. Besides, there are more and more hospitals who somehow manage to let patients choose who gets to visit them, so I don't see why other places should be able to get away with ignoring patients' interests. And yet, they do (especially in Florida, it seems).

Even those authoritarians should be able to welcome the news in part. I've known single evangelical Christians who did not get along with their birth families, and it seems like it would be in their best interests to be able to designate members of their prayer circle as people who can act as family. It's not as if the hospitals limit family rights to spouses anyway--at least when my parents were hospitalized, all blood relatives and relatives-by-marriage who were considered old enough to behave themselves got visiting rights.

Unfortunately, I have been reading comments on newspaper websites. That rarely gives one much hope of human rationality.

[hasufin]

Oh, I agree. I've worked in a hospital; I saw altogether too much of the "that's how we've always done it so that's the right way" going on. Bear in mind that it's been less than 30 years since someone came up with the radical notion that patients should get to choose their own treatment.
And, hell, I had to deal with nurses who felt that The World Was Ending because we made them switch from a decades-old mainframe system to a text-based emulation system which was only 15 years old. TO them, Change Is Bad.

I think that in practice it will be a good idea, though it adds a very modest amount of overhead. But it's something gays want, so to authoritarian types that means it must be bad.

The commentary I've seen tends to fall into the Nirvana fallacy: It's not enough and therefore it's bad.