Oregon Hospitals Didn't Have Shortages. So Why Were Disabled People Denied Care?

December 21, 2020 3:21 PM ET
JOSEPH SHAPIRO

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.

At the same moment, across the United States, disability groups and even a civil rights office of the U.S. government were raising a similar warning: that behind closed doors, people with disabilities, as well as elderly people, were in danger of being denied health care.

NPR was looking for cases, too, and heard about the woman in Pendleton while she was in the hospital.

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