Disability News Now

The battle to reshape Oregon's health care system is heating up in the Legislature, where the Senate is scheduled to pick up Friday where lawmakers left off last session. The changes they adopt could affect your doctor's office sooner than you think. Rather than wait for federal health reforms to kick in, Gov. John Kitzhaber last year spearheaded a law to revamp the state's Medicaid program further and faster. The Legislature passed initial changes, and this month will consider more details to go into effect in July. This next round must be approved to qualify for as much as $2.5 billion in federal reform funds.

"The police need to get out of the suicide business," says Jason Renaud, a co-founder of Mental Health Association of Portland, saying it's a myth that suicidal people are at higher risk of harming others. "If you always send police, that is effectively criminalizing mental illness." Morgan's death even had the Oregonian wondering whether the bureau should resurrect its "old model of having a Crisis Intervention Team of specialized officers available at moment's notice"—precisely echoing a Portland Tribune article last January.

The Nike Innovation Director said amputee athlete Sarah Reinertsen inspired him three years ago to find a better running surface for Reinertsen's prosthetic blade. Reinertsen is an amputee triathlete, the first female above the knee amputee to complete the Ironman® World Championship in Hawaii, a feat completed in 2005. Hatfield recently finished work on the Nike Sole, which features an integrated layered sole including an outsole, midsole and thermal plastic urethane called Aeroply, made of recycled Nike Air Bag units, serving as moderator between Nike Sole and the Össur Flex-Run's carbon fiber blade.

Care providers for seniors and people with disabilities would see their payments cut, a state corrections facility would close, and the number of families with job-related day care would be limited under a budget-rebalancing plan released Wednesday.

The agreement, under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), resolves a complaint filed with the Department of Justice that alleged that the Henry Ford Health System failed to provide sign language interpreters to a deaf patient at one of its in-patient psychiatric facilities and to his family members who are also deaf and need interpreters to communicate effectively with health care providers.

New guidance from the U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights warns school districts that the way they define which students should get special services under federal disability laws may not be broad enough.

A club drug called "Special K" is generating a lot of buzz among researchers who study depression. That's because "Special K," which is actually an FDA-approved anesthetic named ketamine, can relieve even suicidal depression in a matter of hours. And it works on many patients who haven't responded to current antidepressants like Prozac.

"With this app we hope to use the latest technology to change people's mindsets and show how the disability isn't the problem, the lack of access is the problem," said Mr Biddle. "Technology can be great for improving independence and we hope this allows the disabled to decide what they want to do, and just go out and do it."

A non-profit organization, the Community Health Alliance, has brought together physical, dental, mental health and addiction services

Iowa lawmakers are participating in a national effort to reduce use of the word "retarded" or "retardation." A draft bill unveiled this week at the Statehouse would replace the words with "intellectual disability" almost everywhere in state law. The bill is 70 pages long, because the wording shows up so often in laws and regulations.

Fewer patients, more patients: the A.P.A. just can’t win. Someone is always mad at it for its diagnostic manual. It’s not the current A.P.A.’s fault. The fault lies with its predecessors. The D.S.M. is the offspring of odd bedfellows: the medical industry, with its focus on germs and other biochemical causes of disease, and psychoanalysis, the now-largely-discredited discipline that attributes our psychological suffering to our individual and collective history.

The complications in handling the swelling number of aging prisoners range from making allowances for those with Alzheimer’s or dementia and finding sufficient ground-floor cells for inmates in wheelchairs to ensuring that older prisoners are not exploited or robbed by younger inmates. “Age should not be a get-out-of-jail-free card, but when prisoners are so old and infirm that they are not a threat to public safety, they should be released under supervision,” said Jamie Fellner, the author of the study. “Failing that, legislatures are going to have to pony up a lot more money to pay for proper care for them behind bars.”

The decision affects low-income Californians who use the community-based facilities to monitor their medications and health status, which helps them stay out of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.

Virginia will close all but one of its large institutions for the developmentally disabled and move thousands of people into their own homes, their family’s homes or group homes as part of a 10-year, $2.1 billion settlement announced Thursday with the U.S. Justice Department. After decades of legislative reports urging a shift toward community care, Virginia is one of the few states that still place people with developmental disabilities in large institutions.

Six Months In, Bud Clark Commons Offers a Lifeline for Homeless

The agreement expands community-based services so that Virginia can serve people with developmental disabilities in their own homes, their family’s homes or other integrated community settings. The agreement will provide relief for more than 5,000 Virginians with developmental disabilities and will have an impact on thousands more individuals receiving developmental disability services. Over the next 10 years, Virginia will expand community services by providing home and community-based Medicaid waivers to nearly 4,200 individuals; providing family supports to 1,000 individuals currently living in the community; and expanding and deepening its crisis services, including a hotline, mobile crisis teams and short term crisis stabilization programs. This expansion will provide individuals the opportunity to transition successfully from its five state-operated training centers to community settings that can meet their needs and prevent new people from being unnecessarily institutionalized.

Wednesday's class-action case, brought on behalf of the Oregon chapter of the Cerebral Palsy Association and eight individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, is the first of its kind in any state, said Michael Bailey, president of the National Disability Rights Network. The federal court suit was filed in Portland, he said, because Oregon once led the nation in providing vocational training services that helped integrate developmentally disabled workers into actual community-based jobs earning minimum wage or better. But since the mid-1990s, the lawsuit said, "Oregon has reversed course, increasing its reliance on segregated workshops while simultaneously decreasing its development and use of supported employment services."

Michael Bailey with the National Disability Rights Network says even though this is the first suit like it in the country, Oregon is not the worst offender. Bailey says Oregon provided more appropriate services, 20 years ago. "This is not a situation like some states, where they'd have to create this program from whole cloth. All they'd have to do is reallocate their resources into a community-integrated placement."

Advocates hope the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Portland, will set a national precedent and end the practice of having people with disabilities to spend their days in "sheltered workshops," where they complete repetitive or rote tasks for a sub-minimum wage and without the opportunity for training or advancement. At any given time, according to the lawsuit, more than 2,300 Oregonians are "stuck in long-term, dead-end, facility based sheltered workshops that offer virtually no interaction with non-disabled peers."

The business plan will now be delivered to the Legislature, which must approve the plan during its month-long session that gets under way next Wednesday for the Oregon Health Authority to get the necessary federal waivers and begin setting the stage for coordinated care organizations (CCOs) to emerge. The backbone of the reforms made to the Oregon Health Plan in House Bill 3650, CCOs will integrate and coordinate physical, mental and dental healthcare for more than 600,000 people on the Oregon Health Plan. It’s largely expected that the Legislature will approve that plan, but also consider changes to the certification process for CCOs, their governance structure and alternative dispute resolution. How a CCO bears risk and what happens if a CCO fails have also been frequently discussed at legislative hearings.