While disability takes many forms, the doctors had much to say about people who use wheelchairs. Some doctors said their office scales could not accommodate wheelchairs, so they had told patients to go to a supermarket, a grain elevator, a cattle processing plant or a zoo to be weighed, or they would tell a new patient the practice was closed.
One said he didn’t think he could legally just refuse to see a patient who has a disability — he had to give the patient an appointment. But, he added, “You have to come up with a solution that this is a small facility, we are not doing justice to you, it is better you would be taken care of in a special facility.”
The doctors also explained why they could be so eager to get rid of these patients, focusing on the shrinking amount of time doctors are allotted to spend with individual patients.
“Seeing patients at a 15-minute clip is absolutely ridiculous,” one doctor said. “To have someone say, ‘Well we’re still going to see those patients with mild to moderate disability in those time frames’ — it’s just unreasonable and it’s unacceptable to me.”