Press Release
Can Health Care Providers Discriminate Against COVID-19 Patients on Basis of Age or Disability?
Thomas More Society & Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund Warn: Age or Disability-Based Denials Violate Rights
Media contact: Tom Ciesielka, 312.422.1333, [email protected]
(March 23, 2020 – Rancho Santa Fe, California) Current anxiety about the COVID-19 pandemic has been multiplied by the suggestion of “health care rationing” based on the age or disability of infected patients. Attorneys representing the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund and the Thomas More Society have published a legal memorandum detailing the tenets of federal law and explaining that federal civil rights statutes prohibit discrimination - including discriminatory policies established by state health officials - based on age or disability.
The memorandum was prepared and released at the request of three prominent scholars after reports that several state level authorities were considering the rationing of care based on age or disability in the wake of critical medical supply shortages and severe strains on health systems, facilities, and staffs.
Charles LiMandri, partner at LiMandri & Jonna LLP, in his capacity as Special Counsel for the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund and the Thomas More Society, was the lead attorney on the memorandum that confirms the prohibitions of discriminatory health care decisions under federal civil rights laws.
“The present pandemic may be used to try to justify the ‘hard decision’ to issue policies rationing care on the basis of disability or age,” writes LiMandri. “Doing so, however, would violate federal law regarding invidious discrimination. It will open up the purveyors of those policies to legal liability.”
Thomas More Society Vice President and Senior Counsel Peter Breen explained, “We’re reading the unthinkable – the Seattle Times reported that Washington state and hospital officials have been meeting to consider how to decide who lives and dies. In our nation’s capital, the Washington Post is running editorials about the ‘nightmare’ of rationing health care, as is the National Review in the hard-hit state of New York. The horrific idea of withholding care from someone because they are elderly or disabled, is untenable and represents a giant step in the devaluation of each and every human life in America.”
Princeton University’s Dr. Robert P. George, along with Harvard University sociologist Dr. Jacqueline C. Rivers, and bioethicist Dr. Charles C. Camosy of Fordham University, made the request of the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund and the Thomas More Society, both of whom LiMandri serves as litigation counsel.
The three have heavyweight credentials. George, Princeton’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, has also served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the President’s Council on Bioethics. Rivers is a lecturer at Harvard and is the executive director of the Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies. Camosy has authored five books examining cultural ethics, including the healthcare focused Too Expensive to Treat?
The joint legal analysis concluded that withholding care based on age or disability would indeed be contrary to federal law, which requires that, “Decisions regarding the critical care of patients during the current crisis must not discriminate on the basis of disability or age. Decisions must be made solely on clinical factors as to which patients have the greatest need and the best prospect of a good medical outcome. Therefore, disability and age should not be used as categorical exclusions in making these critical decisions.”
LiMandri observed that, “All those involved in making critical decisions concerning who gets such life-saving care, including the use of a limited supply of respirators, would be wise to heed this advice.”
Read the March 23, 2020, Memorandum on Federal Law on Rationing Medical Care on the Bases of Disability and Age, published by attorney Charles LiMandri, of LiMandri & Jonna LLP, in the capacity of Special Counsel with the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund and the Thomas More Society here [https://www.thomasmoresociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Age-and-Disability-Discrimination-Memo_FINAL.pdf].
About the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund
The Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund is a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to vindicating the constitutional rights of all Americans. Through impact litigation, educational programs and policy advocacy, the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund spearheads initiatives on issues related to religious freedom, bioethics, and American values, with a focus on funding trial-level constitutional litigation. For more information, visit fcdflegal.org.
About the Thomas More Society
The Thomas More Society is a national not-for-profit law firm dedicated to restoring respect in law for life, family, and religious liberty. Headquartered in Chicago, Omaha, and Fairfield, NJ, the Thomas More Society fosters support for these causes by providing high quality pro bono legal services from local trial courts all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. For more information, visit thomasmoresociety.org.
As citizens concerned about “flattening the curve” of the impact of the Corona virus, especially for our most vulnerable populations, here in my Maryland Focolare community house we are hunkered down indoors, pretty much emerging only for essential groceries and a socially distanced walk in the neighborhood.
As we stayed home yesterday (Sunday), what to make of the cessation of public liturgies? I realize there has been some discussion in the religious press about whether this is a sign of solidarity or of cowardly capitulation. Personally, I see it as an unambiguous sign of wise, prudent, loving solidarity.
Perhaps because of our community’s international reach, the news of the tragic proportion of the crisis, especially in Italy and other countries, often arrives with a very individual human face: the illness or death of someone we know, or of their relatives, of a community leader in a specific city, and yesterday the news that in one Italian town a whole convent of 40 religious sisters is infected.
With this awareness, I have received the national and local public health recommendations with tremendous sense of gravity. As a Catholic who in normal times is a daily mass goer, this past week I have found great solace by participating in a recording of the daily mass celebrated by Pope Francis. I have been wonderfully nourished by his essential homilies, petitions that embrace the wide range of suffering on our planet, and the profound invitation to reverent “spiritual communion.”
When the Holy Father pauses at length before the Blessed Sacrament at the end of the liturgy, I of course realize that there is a tremendous difference between physical presence in church and my interaction with a recording on a screen.
But in these circumstances, I also sense that this enormous gap can be filled with love: the love that emerges from being united with our local Archbishop, who issued the guidelines to not publicly gather; love for those who are most vulnerable to the virus, especially those who are elderly or with fragile health; and of course a very concrete love for our medical workers, with the awareness of how reductions in public gatherings can contribute to keeping them from getting overwhelmed… and so on.
We are One Body, the Body of Christ – and we are experiencing that reality in a way that I never imagined we could.
So what is mine to do in these circumstances? First, I feel a very deep invitation to prayer. Struggling with insomnia as I worry about the people in my life who are vulnerable, I have been pasting tiny post-its with their names on a large picture of “Mary Untier of Knots,” and I feel that with this Our Lady herself is helping me to let her hold those fears in her loving hands. Second, I try to reach out (via email, zoom or phone) to at least two people per day (beyond those in my community house), to simply check in, listen, and participate in whatever they are going through, to again bring all of those concerns to prayer.
Finally, leaning on these two walking sticks, I have sensed over the past week that these practices nourish the insight that I need to be thoughtful in my approach to accompanying my students as we proceed with a virtual teaching platform. I intuit that they may need different things at different times: some need continuity in the projects that they have undertaken, others need flexibility, and others are in dire need of a listening ear. And perhaps most fruitful, these practices also help me to admit that I too feel vulnerable, and greatly in need of a sense of connection and community. Amy Uelmen
