By Josh Milton | Pink News
Pockets of leaders around the world have used the coronavirus crisis to consolidate power and strike against vulnerable communities within their borders.
Joining the governments of Poland, Britain and Hungary, whose leaders have launched attacks against marginalized and vulnerable groups, is the US.
In the cratering, paranoiac throes of the pandemic, the Trump administration appears closer than ever before in scrapping an Obama-era policy that protected LGBT+ patients from discrimination, alarming health chiefs who stress that the virus poses an increased risk to queer folk.
The US Department of Health and Human Services is, according to Politico, close to finalising its rollback of Obamacare’s section 1557 provision that once safeguarded queer patients from suffering discrimination based on sex and gender identity.
Trump move to revoke protections will deter LGBT people seeking healthcare, visits warn.
Activists and health chiefs fear that the skewering of the Affordable Care Act will allow public health providers and staffers to freely discriminate LGBT+ people, in what they see as a pointed attack against the community.
It will, activists warn, deter queer people sickened by the virus from getting aid.
In a matter of days, two sources familiar to the administration’s rule on the rewrite claimed, the revised regulation will be rolled out.
Leaving a vacuum in its wake, as without a clear federal law protecting LGBT+ people in healthcare, officials in courts and agencies will be idly left to decide how far interpretations of the law should go in protecting minority rights.
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