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5 Ways Biden’s “American Rescue Plan” Could Help People With Disabilities

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The American Relief Plan is the Biden Administration’s first sample of fully-formed policy since its election campaign. From the looks of it, it may also serve as a first test of its approach to the disability community. The initial signs are promising, though with room for improvement. Of course, a proposal isn’t a law, and legislation that actually passes is rarely the same as what was originally proposed.

Still, it’s not too early to take stock of what the American Relief Plan could offer to people with disabilities during these difficult times, and into the future.

The American Relief Plan is a broad-based effort to further address the many problems created by the Covid-19 pandemic. It would be the third major pandemic assistance package, after the CARES Act, enacted in March, and the Consolidated Appropriations Act from December 2020. The HEROES Act, which passed the House in May was never brought to a vote in the Senate. The new plan isn’t specifically designed to assist just people with disabilities. But since disabled people are at significantly higher risk from Covid-19, and on average less financially secure that most, many of the plan’s provisions could be especially helpful for disabled people.

1. General financial assistance

For a start, the American Relief Plan would provide a number of added and extended financial supplements and stabilizers for broad swaths of Americans. Most notably, the plan would provide additional $1,400 stimulus checks to individuals. These are being framed as a supplement to the $600 checks already approved and sent starting in December, to bring the total second round of individual stimulus payments of $2,000.

The plan would also continue rental assistance, an eviction moratorium, and other housing-related measures, plus extended unemployment benefits and other emergency programs to September 30, 2021. Finally, the plan would provide further financial support through expansion of SNAP (food stamps), and of the Earned Income Tax Credit.

All of these measures serve in small ways and larger to support people’s shaky finances, and prevent further descent into poverty. While not every specific provision would benefit every person, or every single disabled person, they would be sure to be of particular help to a great many people with disabilities who already struggle to stay afloat financially, and have less flexibility to economize during a crisis.

2. Stimulus checks for adult dependents

The two previous stimulus payments left out adults who are dependents on others, including disabled adults who are under the care and financial support of parents or other guardians. So if you are a disabled adult and living with your parents under their financial support, you haven’t qualified for previous Covid-19 stimulus checks. 

But being an adult dependent doesn’t mean you don’t need your own financial support in this crisis. And for adult dependents who are disabled, there can be dozens of reasons for much higher need, even if you are under someone else’s care.

Adding adult dependents to stimulus bills has been a major legislative goal for the disability community since the pandemic began. It’s an encouraging sign and an important step to see them included here. That said, adult dependents were supposed to be covered in previous bills too, like the HEROES Act, and were traded away in negotiations. So advocates will still need to fight to ensure adult dependents are finally covered in the end.

3. Help to reopen schools

This is another example of a goal important to everyone, but important in specific and critical ways to people with disabilities, especially disabled students. The disruption of school because of the pandemic has been especially corrosive to students with disabilities and their families.

Online learning works well for some, and is certainly better than nothing. But for many kids with disabilities, Online learning is much harder to adjust to the unique learning needs of many students with diverse learning, intellectual, and emotional disabilities. And the technology itself is often not accessible to students with specific kinds of disabilities, such as those that require physical computer operation, and systems that lack adequate captioning for Deaf students, or alternative interfaces for students with visual impairments.

At the same time, simply reopening schools and hoping for the best from voluntary safety compliance isn’t enough. Nor is expecting financially-strapped states to meet the unprecedented expenses of running schools without contributing to community spread of the Covid-19 virus. The American Relief Plan would at least provide resources to help schools nationwide make a faster, safer, and more lasting return to normal, diverse, and properly adapted education, for all students, including those with disabilities.

4. Ending sub-minimum wage

While it isn’t as much of a direct response to the pandemic, ending sub-minimum wage would be a huge first step for the Biden Administration’s broader disability rights agenda.

Allowing certain employers to pay some disabled people less than minimum wage under the Department of Labor’s “14(c)” provisions is a longtime practice that has always had the best intentions. It was instituted in the 1930s, and intended to open up job opportunities for people with disabilities who it was assumed could never be hired for regular wages. But sub-minimum wage long since then has become outdated, unnecessary, and personally galling for disabled people who still work under it.

For one thing, many underlying assumptions and methods about disability and employment have changed since the 1930s. And it’s far more common and more readily accepted for disabled people to be in regular workplaces than it was decades ago.

Also, intellectual and developmental disabilities are much better understood now, and the number of people with these and other disabilities who are genuinely and entirely unable to work is much smaller than previously assumed. Meanwhile, employment training and support models that tailor jobs to individuals and specific workplaces have been developed that also didn’t exist in the 1930s. Plus, wider acceptance of disability rights as a concept has increasingly made paying disabled people less than the law would allow for anyone else morally indefensible and personally humiliating.

At least eight states have already either ended or partially phased out the practice. And many individual agencies and employment programs that once used it have given it up in favor of more integrated employment programs with jobs paying minimum wage or higher. In August 2020, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recommended phasing out sub-minimum wage nationwide.

There are many people who want the 14(c) program to continue, including some families and some disabled workers who – simply put – don’t want the status quo to change, and who don’t believe it’s possible for certain disabled people to find work without it. Another concern that should be addressed is how higher wages can affect some disabled people’s benefits and health care eligibility. The technical fixes are easy to do. But changing Social Security rules can be politically difficult.

This is not the first formal proposal or end sub-minimum wage. But it may be the first clear and complete inclusion of it in a Presidential plan. It certainly suggests some degree of boldness and specificity in the new administration’s approach to disability policy.

5. Additional funding for Home and Community Based Services (HCBS)

The most disappointing omission from the American Relief Plan is the lack of support for Home and Community Based Services.

Home and Community Based Services, or HCBS for short, is a category of services that combined make up the main alternative to nursing homes, group homes, and other congregate care for people who need help with everyday tasks and care. It can include any combination of medical, semi-medical, and simple non-medical assistance provided to people with disabilities in their own homes or apartments, paid for by government funds, designed to keep them safe, healthy, and independent.

HCBS can serve younger people and adults with physical disabilities, elderly people with age-related impairments, and people of any age with intellectual and developmental, mental health, or other chronic conditions that make everyday self-care difficult. It provides people with the logistical support they need for everyday tasks they can’t do for themselves because of disabilities, without requiring them to move to a more segregated, closely supervised institutional environment owned and operated by others. This can include help with: bathing and dressing, shopping, cooking, and housekeeping, basic movement and physical tasks around the home, administering medications and home treatments, and help with everyday planning and decision-making. The scope, depth, and amount of these services varies enormously with individual needs and different disabilities.

In addition to the obvious direct benefit of everyday help, HCBS services also helps delay or prevent having to go into congregate care. It is also often key to enabling people in congregate care to move out of it and back to a more independent lifestyle.

Common sense suggests that home care services would be a great and even essential tool to help vulnerable people escape from risky congregate facilities during a pandemic. So far, however, policy and pandemic responses from states and Congress haven’t seemed to recognize this connection. Everyone mourns and condemns the devastating losses at nursing homes and other facilities, but the sadness and outrage mostly haven’t fueled any greater investment in the most obvious safer alternatives.

Even if boosting home care isn’t used as a deliberate method for taking people out of congregate care, at the very least it’s a major connection to another high-risk population, people with disabilities and chronic illnesses who live in their own homes. While home care is safer because it’s more isolated, it still involves unavoidable contact between disabled people and care providers who themselves have unavoidable connections with the wider community, and who can therefore spread Covid-19 to the people they serve, even when they are isolated in their own homes. Likewise, home care workers themselves are at higher risk because like nursing facility and group home workers, their jobs require them to interact with vulnerable patients every day. Plus, home care is safer, but increased safety still requires protective equipment, which not all home care recipients or agencies have in sufficient supply.

Since the start of the pandemic, disability policymakers have practically begged for federal assistance to states that would specifically support home care. This could include a federal match for states’ expenditures on home care services, plus a general increase in overall federal Medicaid funding so states aren’t tempted to cut home care in order to shore up their Medicaid budgets. States have much more limited ability to spend in an emergency, and because of the pandemic, many states are having to cut their budgets exactly when alleviating the effects of the pandemic call for more spending. The federal government has the ability to borrow that the states don’t have. This is why including Home and Community Based Services to the Biden plan would be so important and a vast improvement.

At this point, the American Relief Plan is just a proposal. There is still room for change. It could get better, or become less effective, depending on the flow of advocacy and negotiations in Congress. The final measure could end up being pared down to a minimum, or with major provisions cut away. Or, important new pieces could be added.

The way this plays out for people with disabilities in particular depends partly on how energetically the disability community and its allies advocate for its needs. It also depends, as always, on whether non-disabled communities and institutions will listen.

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