Health Care Discrimination

By Hanna Royer

MAY 2021

Hanna Royer is an intern at an intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) organization in Oregon that strives to protect and defend the Human Rights of those in the IDD community. And encourage and support the participation of their full inclusion in their community during their lifetime

For the ASL version of this blog, go here: https://youtu.be/kj-UZhuZe_s

I have been doing internship work at a disability rights organization in Oregon this semester, and I have learned a lot about access and equity to health care for people with disabilities in the state of Oregon. Discrimination and access to health care for people with disabilities in times of emergency is a critical issue that we need to discuss, and it is relevant today because we are going through a pandemic. Health care discrimination among the disability community in Oregon was a controversial topic during the beginning of the pandemic, and it is still today. And, OregonHealth Authority believes that they are promoting health equity in Oregon, but during the beginning of the pandemic, they were not acting on it. In Oregon, there was a bill regarding health care discrimination and equity that was passed during the summer special session, and I will be discussing later in this blog another bill that is currently in progress in the current legislative session that is supposed to keep health care discrimination and equity in place went the pandemic is over. The bill that is supposedly being pushed through the legislature right now for health care discrimination, and how the people with disabilities respond to that? How will this ill impact people in the disabilities community, and how can we become their advocates?

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