It's. About. Time.

The White House on Thursday released a statement by Obama instructing his Health and Human Services secretary to draft rules requiring hospitals that receive Medicare and Medicaid payments to grant all patients the right to designate people who can visit and consult with them at crucial moments.

The designated visitors should have the same rights that immediate family members now enjoy, Obama's instructions said. It said Medicare-Medicaid hospitals, which include most of the nation's facilities, may not deny visitation and consultation privileges on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.

... The new rules, Obama said, should "guarantee that all patients' advance directives, such as durable powers of attorney and health care proxies, are respected," and that patients' designees be able to "make informed decisions regarding patients' care."

Talk about overdue. News coverage will probably continue to concentrate on what this means for same-sex partners, but this is good news for everybody, regardless of your beliefs or your relationships. Even at times in my life when I was trying with all my might to be a fundamentalist, I never, never could get behind the idea that anybody should be denied the right to see their loved ones when they're sick or dying. Hospital rules allowing only visitors who happen to be in a certain sort of legal relationship to the patient--no matter what the patient's own preferences are--are cruel and inhumane punishments for vulnerable people. We all know people who have been abused by family members, and yet those abusers have in many cases had greater rights over hospitalized people than the folks in their lives who actually cared.

It is a happy thing to see good news in the morning.