Health Care Reform and Disability Rights

The following article comes to us via The Inclusion Daily Express. We have some comments about it which follow as they say “On the other side”.

 

State Settles 9-Year-Old Suit Over Waiting List
(Associated Press)
August 4, 2009
MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA– [Excerpt] The state government has settled a 9-year-old lawsuit over the lengthy waiting list to get services for adults with mental disabilities.

‘This is going to be a much more open system for all people who are interested,’ said James Tucker, an attorney for Alabama Disability Advocacy Program, which represented disabled adults in the litigation.

The suit was filed in 2000 and accused the state of violating federal law by not having enough services, ranging from in-home support to group homes.

Robert Regulus of Jefferson County said his 23-year-old son, Jeremy, who has Down syndrome, has been on a waiting list for services since he left public school two years ago.

Entire article:
Lawsuit over Alabama services to disabled settled
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/2009/red/0804c.htm

 

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The laws of this great nation guarantee people their civil rights. Accordingly health care reform is a civil rights issue when considered in the context of aging or the elderly or of children or adults in poverty. You will not hear this assertion broadly in the media–making the connection between the health care reform debate and civil rights is apparently too risky for it is redolent of the game of Russian dolls, each smaller and inserted inside the larger. Health care reform is best discussed as a matter of saving money for our nation. Inside that “doll” you will find another smaller doll, this one betokening a severely shrinking American middle class that cannot afford basic human services of any kind.

(Five or so years ago I spoke with a psychologist who had put up a new shingle: his office was in a wealthy suburb of Columbus, Ohio and his new Welcome sign was in the service of finding elite residential mental health facilities for the troubled children of the very rich. During our talk he said to me: “Not everyone gets to go to Harvard.”) 

Inside the shrinking middle class doll is the doll of national survival though you could also call it the doll of St. Stephen for failing to understand this doll will lead to the hurling of stones. The survival of our nation depends on our ability to save the middle classes for America is not temperamentally suited to becoming a banana republic wherein the rich have their private medicine and the rest are left to wander the streets in search of food and medicine according to luck. Yet even if Americans were temperamentally prone to sanctioned heartlessness, our nation’s laws tell another story.

In effect the lobbyists who are spending in a giggling fit to preserve the scarcity model of medical services are actually proposing that the United States should violate its own civil rights protections. Money can accomplish only so much. While the Center for Responsive Politics estimates that the insurance lobbyists have spent 263 million dollars this year to derail health care reform on capitol hill, the story above tells us that the courts will very likely demand fairness in mental health facilities, as well as all programs that provide health care for those who can’t go to Harvard.

It is my belief that President Obama needs to talk to the nation much as President Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This address would argue the evident truth–that our very survival as a middle class country depends on reform “now” and not simply because this will save money but because our courts and laws demand it.

S.K.