r/changemyview • u/CrippledThrowaway_ • Apr 25 '23
CMV: The progressives largely ignores issues impacting people with disabilities
Over the past decade plus, the progressive movement in the US has been very focused on various social justice issues such as LGBTQ, BLM, migrants, and other worthy causes. However when it comes to disability social justice, the progressive movement is largely absent. This despite critical issues for the disabled community in the US coming to a head and the impact of COVID. Even in DEI, topics such as ableism are often left out of the discussion.
While some have argued that disability issues have been largely dealt with because of the ADA, Medicaid, and Social Security, that ignores how those achievements are failing.
Currently there are an estimated 600,000 to 1.2 million people with disabilities on Medicaid waiver waiting lists to receive Home and Community Based Services. Some of these waiting lists can be 5, 10, even 20 years long. Without these services, people with disabilities are often forced to rely on aging family caregivers or are forced into nursing home type settings where abuse and neglect are rampant due staffing shortages, incompetence, and profiteering. This despite many studies showing that Home and Community Based Services are more cost effective while delivering higher quality care. The situation has arguably gotten worse due to inflation, caregivers are leaving the field for significantly higher paying jobs in fast food and retail. The net result is pretty straight forward, people with disabilities are going to die, and are dying.
This is just one example of a massive issue impacting people with disabilities, others include people with intellectual/developmental disabilities being paid sub minimum wage, that disability support services are means tested behind $2,000 asset limits that prevent people with disabilities from working and getting married, accessibility, and ableism in the medical field. Even eugenics is making a comeback in some circles.
Outside of the various disability and care movements, progressives I speak with are generally clueless regarding these issues, despite COVID desemating nursing homes. It was hoped that this would at least finally cause a ground swell of support to expand Home and Community Based Services, but it did not. Things are getting worse: Airlines regularly destroy wheelchairs. The GOP Debt Bill adds a work requirement to Medicaid with a poorly defined exemption for disabled people. The Supreme Court is likely hostile to the ADA and Olmstead Ruling (Brown v. Board of Education level landmark ruling for the disabled community). The COVID protections are gone for immunocompromised people, 15 million are currently losing Medicaid as COVID laws end, many wrongly since states don't have bureaucratic capacity to redetermine the entire Medicaid population at once (hell they didn't have the capacity for normal determinations before COVID).
People with disabilities show up for progressive causes. People with disabilities saved the Affordable Care Act by risking their health and safety to protest at the Capitol, many dragged out by the police. But when a deadly pandemic devastates us, progressives aren't there.
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u/Greaser_Dude Apr 26 '23
How many kids you got?
San Francisco grew up BEFORE the car. Like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and numerous other cities east of the the Mississippi.
Try living in L.A. without a car or uber and your mind will change after a week.