The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals building in New Orleans, Louisiana.Rex Wholster/Getty

For decades, American hospitals have been subject to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and to the Americans with Disabilities Act, landmark federal disability civil rights laws that guarantee equal access to health care. But Hickson v. St. David’s Healthcare Partnership, a case before the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, could upend those protections—giving the court a chance to seriously undercut disability discrimination claims in medical settings.

In 2017, Michael Hickson, a 46-year-old disabled Black man in Austin, Texas, developed brain damage and became quadriplegic following a heart attack; in 2020, a court placed Hickson in the guardianship of an outside firm that took charge of his medical decisions.

The firm placed Hickson in a nursing home, where, in May 2020, he contracted Covid. Brought to an Austin-area hospital, Hickson was denied services including mechanical ventilation to help him breathe. At the time, early in the pandemic, 25 states maintained policies around triage procedures that seemingly deprioritized care for disabled people.

Hickson’s wife wanted her husband to receive the same quality of care as non-disabled people in the hospital’s ICU. But he didn’t.

In the early pandemic, some providers treated triage policies “as a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card.”

“As of right now, his quality of life, he doesn’t have much of one,” one doctor said of Hickson at the time.

Instead, Hickson was moved to hospice, where he died on June 11 that year. Hickson’s wife, who wasn’t notified for some 12 hours, alleged in a YouTube video after his death that the court “decided to........

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