Trump is waging a war on people with disabilities
Policies the Trump administration has pursued have made it difficult for many disable people to lead independent lives.Three Novembers ago, then-candidate Donald Trump came under fire for mocking a reporter living with arthrogryposis, a condition that limits joint function. It was a harbinger of what was to come for America's disabled in the Trump era. His administration and representatives of his party in Congress have been dead-set on destroying the lives of disabled Americans for the last two years.
As part of ongoing efforts to repeal Obamacare and cut America's safety-net, Trump and congressional Republicans wish to undermine Medicaid, the federal health programme for the poor, elderly, disabled and children. The neediest Americans, including many members of the disabled community, use 80 percent of Medicaid's budgeted services.
To this day, Republicans advocate limiting federal per-capita Medicaid spending. Such cuts would cause states to raise taxes, pay doctors less, limit coverage eligibility and cut back on services. Cuts would bring an end to programmes such as Medicaid-funded personal care attendants. Almost three million disabled Americans use this programme to live, get out of bed, bathe, eat, drive to work and go to sleep.
Medicaid pays for more than half of in-home services in the US. It's the engine that allows many disabled Americans to live independently. Previous Obamacare repeal attempts could have lead to the unnecessary institutionalisation of millions, condemning them to a life of limited freedom and autonomy. Trump and congressional Republicans could care less, as they clearly demonstrated with multiple attempts to destroy Medicaid and gut civil rights laws.
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It was 'cost effective' wholesale murder of the most vulnerable based in eugenics pseudo science. Godwin spoke far too soon, glad he amended his law.
Memorial to the Nazis Disabled Victims, The Atlantic, Sept., 2014.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/a-memorial-to-the-nazis-disabled-victims/379528/
Thus began Aktion T4, a widespread involuntary euthanasia program under which the Third Reich would exterminate more than 300,000 physically and mentally disabled people during World War II. A month after Gerhard's death, Hitler issued a decree that all others deemed "unworthy of living" should be similarly killed. The German Interior Ministry began requiring doctors to register all newborns born with Down syndrome, deformities, or epilepsy. Parental consent for the babies' removal was initially coerced, and then forced.
The regime then moved on to killing disabled adults in Poland and in Germany. A program called the "Charitable Foundation for Cure and Institutional Care," operating out of a building at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin, required German hospitals and institutions to produce lists of patients with schizophrenia, dementia, paralysis, and other conditions. Those individuals were then rounded up and gassed. Their families were sent urns of assorted ashes from the mass cremations and certificates stating fictional causes of death.
