Family values?

Twenty disabled activists, many of them in wheelchairs, were arrested outside of Sen. John McCain’s Washington office after being denied a meeting to discuss bill S. 799. The bill, stuck in committee since last year, would amend the Social Security Act to allow people who are eligible for Medicaid coverage of nursing home costs to spend it instead on home-based, or community care.

“If he should be president, it would be ironic that he comes from a party that talks a lot about family values,” said Bob Kafka, national organizer for ADAPT, a group advocating for passage of the bill. Without the legislation, many disabled and elderly people don’t have the choice to apply coverage to anything other than institutional care, he said.

Sponsored by Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., it also would grant extra money to states that participate in the program, according to a summary of the bill.

Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, are co-sponsors of the bill, but McCain is not.

Sen. McCain’s representatives said that the protesters were offered a meeting with aides, but McCain himself was out of town campaigning in Florida.

OK, I wasn’t there. I don’t know the he said, she said of the drama, but what were the activists doing to get arrested? The AP story said they were arrested for unlawful assembly, but it seems a little ridiculous to me.

Any thoughts on the bill or the arrests?

Candidates on Disabilities

As election season continues to drag on the democratic candidates are getting scrutinized on everything from economic plans to bowling. A hot topic on the campaign trail has been healthcare plans. Much ado has been made over universal healthcare versus employer-sponsored packages and on and on. However, I have heard little about the candidates’ policies on disabilities. Crookedtimber.org has a post breaking down the candidates positions.

OK, so go to Hillary’s web page, click on “Issues,” choose “Providing Affordable and Accessible Health Care,” then go over to the right sidebar – the one headed “Hillary’s Plans,” and go down to the subheading, “How Hillary’s plan affects:” and then click on “Americans with Disabilities.” You’ll get a .pdf that reads, in part:

Employer-sponsored health care can present significant cost and coverage concerns for both employers and people with disabilities. Some insurance plans cap payments for durable medical equipment, which includes items such as wheelchairs, crutches, braces, and ventilators; in effect, making coverage for those items unavailable. The American Health Choices Plan prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage to limiting coverage for pre-existing conditions. In addition, insurers will be prohibited from charging significantly higher premiums based on medical conditions, age, gender, or occupation.

This is good stuff, though it painfully exposes the problem of relying on employer-sponsored health care in the first place – and doesn’t mention the fact that the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is . . . well, exceptionally difficult to determine, but quite high. But then, there’s another problem here, and throughout Clinton’s website: because (as is so often the case), there’s no separate heading for policies affecting people with disabilities, you have to look around under other issues – in this case, health care – to see if disability is mentioned.

…

Obama, by contrast, has a separate heading titled “Disabilities.” This in itself is remarkable; but it turns out that this isn’t just a matter of better web design. Whoever is advising Obama on disability policy is really, really smart. The nine-page .pdf, “Barack Obama’s Plan to Empower Americans with Disabilities”, says many of the same things Hillary does – about supporting full funding for IDEA, providing health coverage for the most vulnerable among us, and hiring 100,000 people with disabilities in the federal government (except that someone needs to tell the Obama camp that it’s Executive Order 13163 Obama needs to reinstate, not 13173, which created an Interagency Task Force on the Economic Development of the Central San Joaquin Valley; reinstating 13173, whatever its merits, probably won’t do much for disability policy in the United States). But the plan is, remarkably enough, at once broader and more specific than Clinton’s.

For Web accessibility purposes, I like how he directs you to exactly where you need to click through to find the policies that he’s referring to.

It’s lengthy, but a useful post for anyone interested in the election and those concerned about healthcare for people with disabilities and handicaps. The comment section is worth taking a look at as well, as the commenters bounce ideas off one another and provide direction to more material on the subject.