Priorities

[talon]

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63F0BV20100416

Yanno, it was good of Obama to take time out of his relentless schedule of trying to fix America's imbalances to issue this memorandum.

I find it sad and deeply disturbing that he had to issue such a memorandum.

Hospitals are not prisons, and yet, if you are a patient there, you might as well be an inmate in a prison facility, often locked into solitary confinement. And then - tortured by the medical interventions and procedures without any recourse to legal assistance. In the years I've been doing hospital chaplaincy work, I've come to view the nurses as prison wardens and the doctors as the enforcement arm of the judge and jury insurance companies. The compassion for the inmate prisoner patient's comfort and anxieties are the least of their concerns. Indeed, in many of the cases I personally witnessed, the patients were denied visitors just because nurses could and not because of any health reasons. Many abided so strictly by the "relatives only" rule that foster children, fiancées, adopted children, cousins, aunts, uncles, and others who could legitimately claim "relative" were excluded, along with best friends, roommates, students, teachers, live-in lovers, civil partners, and others who have a claim on the patient's heart. Most of them hid behind HIPAA when hospital regulations weren't enough, but if you actually read HIPAA, it doesn't deny all these people the right to visit their loved one in the hospital.

From the cases I observed, these patients were denied visits from their loved ones because it might have made more work for the nurses, might have given the patient an advocate when the patient most needed one, and the visitors might have "gotten in the way".

It always cheered me to see the Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans surrounded by hordes of family members in the hospital pretending to not understand English just so they could visit and comfort their hospitalized loved one. African Americans, Amerindians, and Caucasian Americans have a harder time pulling the "no speeka da angish" act because they are expected to speak English, although if they have a strong ethnic look they can sometimes get away with it.

Obama's memorandum affects not only gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people, it affects the elderly who've outlived their family, the single people who are living far from immediate family, orphans, the celibate and chaste, those in religious orders, and even those in cults who have renounced their flesh-and-blood relatives.

Perhaps hospitals will feel less like prisons and more like places of healing with this memorandum in place.