(Adnkronos) – Military hospital doctors may now deny care to unmarried veterans or those registered as Democrats. This is what emerges – the Guardian reveals – from the new guidelines that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the department that manages assistance to former military personnel, has drawn up on the basis of the executive order signed by Donald Trump a few days after his return to the White House to abolish all forms of government protection for transgender people.
According to documents obtained by the Guardian, the guidelines – already in force in some of the VA’s 170 hospitals and over a thousand medical centers, which, with 26,000 doctors, provide assistance to 9 million patients a year – therefore allow assistance to be denied on the basis of personal characteristics that are not explicitly indicated in federal law, which requires care to be provided to former military personnel regardless of their race, skin color, religion, and sex.
In application of the order that Trump titled “Protecting Women from Extremist Gender Ideology and Restoring Biological Truth in Federal Government,” military hospitals no longer offer gender-affirming hormone therapies, banning the terminology itself. All of this “seems to open the door to discrimination based on anything that is not protected by law,” says Kenneth Kizer, who headed the VA during Bill Clinton’s time, stressing that the new guidelines allow care to be denied even “based on the reasons why care is sought, including rape and sexual assault, political affiliation or activity, alcohol or marijuana use.”
