AccessAbility

Epic Fail
by Ken Dibble

The flipside of sympathy is contempt. The flipside of respect is power.

Back in 1993, journalist Joseph Shapiro, author of No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement, asked, “What happens when Congress grants a new minority group rights and society has little understanding of those rights, why they were awarded, or even why they are needed? ” He was talking about the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which had been enacted into law three years earlier—20 years ago this July.

Shapiro predicted that “As the newly recognized minority of people with disabilities asserts those rights, there will be many breakthroughs for equality. But there will also be clashes, misunderstandings, even a backlash. ” Continue reading...

How Do You Spell Power?
by Bob Deemie, Darlene Dickinson, Kendrick Kemp, Susie Link and Susan Ruff

The last week of April offered five STICsters the opportunity to travel to Washington to join hundreds of people from around the country for several days of ADAPT actions in support of disability civil rights and the passage of the Community Choice Act(CCA).

The CCA, if passed, would give people with disabilities in every state a choice of homecare or nursing facility care. According to ADAPT, “Sixty seven percent of Medicaid long term dollars pay for institutional services, while the remaining thirty three percent must cover all the community based waivers, optional programs, etc.” Passing the CCA will allow people who need attendant services to live in their own homes in every state.

Across the nation Olmstead cases and civil rights cases are being fought (see Courts Watch) and disability rights advocates want the Department of Justice to actively enforce the ADA and other laws and regulations.Continue reading...

Courts Watch

DAI v Paterson

As expected, a few days after we went to press in March, Governor Paterson announced that he would appeal the federal District Court judge’s order that NYS move over 4200 people with mental health disabilities out of segregated adult “homes” and into individualized supported living situations within three years.

Accompanying Paterson’s announcement was a firestorm of angry, and in some cases bitterly personal, attacks against the federal judge, Nicholas Garaufis, and against people with mental illness, in the New York City regional media. The outcry showed that ignorance about mental illness and available supports and services is widespread, not only among the general public and media pundits, but among mental health professionals as well. Continue reading...

Life or Death: Out of Your Hands?

For many years, New Yorkers with disabilities could rely on the fact that state law prohibited doctors or family members from “pulling the plug” on them without their consent when facing serious medical problems. As of March 2010, that protection for your life no longer exists.

The “Family Health Care Decisions Act” brings New York State law into line with that of most other states in permitting doctors or family members to make the decision to let you die if you get into a situation where you can’t communicate.

We’ve always urged people with disabilities to carry written instructions for how they want medical emergencies to be handled, and to choose a trusted health care “agent” to ensure that those instructions are carried out. Now it ’s not just a good idea. Now it’s ESSENTIAL. If you don’t have those instructions, and an agent to ensure they’re followed, you could get hit by a car, choke on your hot dog, or catch a serious case of pneumonia, and if you’re unconscious and fall into the hands of one of the many thousands of doctors who believe that having a disability automatically means you have a “low quality of life”, you could be allowed to die. Continue reading...

No Bus, Make a Fuss

Broome County Transit’s proposed cutbacks on bus service have been well publicized. What has not been made clear is how harshly this will affect people with disabilities.

Public transit in our region is used disproportionately by low-income people to go to work or shop. Although some of the routes proposed to be cut are called “shopper’s specials”, these routes are still used by many people to get to work. Many people with disabilities work in the big-box stores and restaurants on Vestal Parkway, one of the areas where service is proposed to be cut. When this point was brought to the attention of BC Transit Commissioner George Bagnetto, he allegedly said, “People should just adjust their work schedules.” Despite the fact that he started out as a bus driver, Bagnetto is obviously completely out of touch with the needs of low-income working people in this community. Continue reading...

Summer 2010 Issue No. 99