NYT: Elizabeth Warren Opens a New Front in Disability Policy

[crazytown]

Elizabeth Warren Opens a New Front in Disability Policy

As they craft their disability rights plans, the 2020 candidates are consulting the people they would affect. “This is how policy should be made,” one advocate said.

(snip) For months, Democratic presidential candidates have built on one another in this arena, culminating last week with a plan from Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts whose scope shocked many advocates.

That plan and the way Ms. Warren developed it, with a working group of about a dozen people with disabilities, reflect a sea change. More presidential candidates than ever before are acknowledging how many issues, from criminal justice to student debt, affect people with disabilities, who make up a quarter of the country’s adult population. And more people with disabilities are shaping the policies that could affect them.

“Candidates are actually listening to disabled people,” said Rebecca Cokley, director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, who was part of Ms. Warren’s working group and has advised several other candidates on their plans. “This is how policy should be made. It matters who’s at the table.”

Ms. Warren is not the only candidate to take a new approach. Several activists praised Julián Castro, the former housing secretary who ended his campaign and endorsed Ms. Warren this month, for his attention to disability policy. Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., has an extensive plan.

And Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota released a proposal on Friday — developed with disability rights groups, her campaign said — that would, among other things, expand home- and community-based services, make technologies like speech-generating devices more accessible, increase Social Security disability payments and strengthen anti-discrimination laws.

But the disability community has responded more enthusiastically to Ms. Warren’s plan than to any other so far. “It is the most comprehensive thing I have seen in my 20 years of looking at these things,” said Jason Dorwart, a theater professor at Oberlin College who is quadriplegic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-disability-plan.html

[duforsure]

1. Thank you Senator Warren for doing this,

Especially while trump and the republicans are planning ways to hurt them with phony restriction guidelines for re-application for disabilities to lesson the numbers of people getting it , and their destruction of Medicaid, Medicare, and especially Social Security. Like they are doing to the ACA now, putting into bills provisions to dramatically increase its costs, right before the 2016 election then claiming because it wasn't a good plan.trump claimed that often, remember because he knew the provision would jack up people's premiums . Just like trump and republicans want no pre-existing conditions ever covered while they do everything they can to strip them away,, or make them so hard to get, like he's doing with immigration refugee's. They'll likely never get them to accept it for coverage's if trump and the GOP get their way.

[backtoblue]

2. K&R

[brer cat]

3. K&R