The nondiscrimination clause of the Affordable Care Act, known as Section 1557, formally expanded patients' civil rights in nearly every healthcare setting in the United States in 2010. Regulations required healthcare organizations to name a person to handle grievances and set up an internal grievance process for resolving them. Drawing on interviews with 58 healthcare grievance handlers, this study examines how healthcare organizations respond to patients' discrimination complaints. We find that organizations incorporated the new right into preexisting complaint and grievance procedures, treating possible patient civil rights violations as patient experience problems. Grievance handlers smooth over problems using customer service strategies. These procedures diminish the efforts of policymakers to expand civil rights protections in healthcare. For civil rights to provoke real organizational change, discrimination complaints would need to be handled by professionals attuned to rights consciousness.

中文翻译：

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公民权利作为患者的经验：医疗机构如何处理歧视投诉

《 Affordable Care Act》（第1557节）中的非歧视条款在2010年美国几乎所有医疗机构中都正式扩大了患者的公民权利。法规要求医疗机构指定一名要处理申诉的人并建立内部申诉程序解决它们。这项研究以对58位医疗投诉人员的采访为基础，研究了医疗机构如何应对患者的歧视投诉。我们发现，组织将新权利纳入了先前存在的投诉和申诉程序中，将可能的患者侵犯民权行为视为患者经历问题。投诉处理人员使用客户服务策略来解决问题。这些程序减少了决策者为扩大医疗保健中的民权保护而做出的努力。为了使公民权利引起真正的组织变革，歧视投诉将需要由适应权利意识的专业人员来处理。