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Trump Administration Dismantles LGBT-Friendly Policies
Despite Trump’s promise to defend LGBTQ rights, his White House continues to take aggressive, bigoted steps to block government efforts to fight discrimination. It is doing so by cutting budgets, dissolving programs and appointing officials unsympathetic to previous practices.
The nation's health department is taking steps to dismantle LGBT health initiatives, as political appointees have halted or rolled back regulations intended to protect LGBT workers and patients, removed LGBT-friendly language from documents and reassigned the senior adviser dedicated to LGBT health.
....a population that's been historically vulnerable to discrimination in health care settings.... A Health Affairs study last year found that many LGBT individuals have less access to care than heterosexuals; in a Harvard-Robert Wood Johnson-NPR survey one in six LGBT individuals reported experiencing discrimination from doctors or at a clinic.
For example:
The Obama administration in 2016 also finalized a regulation, Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, that banned discrimination in health care based on sexual orientation and extended those protections to transgender individuals for the first time.
But upon taking office last year, the Trump administration swiftly froze a series of LGBT-friendly rules, including proposed new regulations to further ban discrimination in Medicare and Medicaid. A regulation that would have allowed transgender HHS staff more protections when using the department's bathrooms and other facilities also was ignored.
Re-read that. The Trump administation froze a rule that sought to ban discrimination!
Another quiet battle has been over a pair of HHS surveys, with the Trump administration moving to strike questions about sexual orientation that had been added by the Obama administration in order to understand health disparities and LGBT specific health issues. The two surveys are used to shape policy for older and disabled Americans, respectively. The Trump administration subsequently reinstated some of the questions after an outcry.
"A lot of people think data are really boring. But data are fundamental, especially to public health," said Baker, the Johns Hopkins researcher. "The only way to have the evidence you need to prioritize and spend wisely to address disparities is to have data about those disparities."
As previously reported by Smart Dissent in this January 29, 2018 post, one of Trump's appointed leaders of the Health and Human Services Department is Roger Severino, director for the HHS Office of Civil Rights. His job is to protect us all against discrimination in the healthcare sector. Yet he is openly homophobic and that's putting it lightly.
Severino....has said that the Supreme Court's 2015 decision on same-sex marriage was "wrong" and repeatedly warned of its consequences. "Same-sex marriage was merely the start, not end, of the left’s LGBT agenda," Severino wrote in May 2016, about 10 months before he was tapped by Trump to be the health department's top civil rights official. "The radical left is using government power to coerce everyone, including children, into pledging allegiance to a radical new gender ideology over and above their right to privacy, safety, and religious freedom."
Last month Severino established a new religious liberty division to defend health workers who have religious objections to treating LGBT patients as noted in our January 29th post. Trump and his appointees are PRO-DISCRIMINATION. Who is left to protect the oppressed when the government turns their back?
Sources:
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/19/trump-lgbt-rights-discrimination-353774
http://smartdissent.com/article/health-and-human-services-department-says-healthcare-workers-can