Saturday, March 20, 2010

Republicans Voting 'No' On Health Care Reform At Their Own Peril


The Republicans have already shown us what their version of "health care reform" is.

On March 17, Arizona Republican Governor Jan Brewer sent an anti-health reform letter to Speaker Pelosi. Referring to the pending legislation, Brewer wrote "The devastating impacts of the federal legislation will rob Arizonans of their rights and pocketbooks alike."

The next day she became the first US governor to eliminate a state's entire Children's Health Care Program, thereby robbing about 47,000 children of their rights to medical care.

Since Arizona's federal matching funds rate is over 75%, by cutting $385 million from the state Medicaid budget, Brewer is actually losing her state a total of about $1.5 billion in jobs and services.

Last month, the Office for Civil Rights at DHHS opened two official investigations into whether Hawaii, also under a Republican governor, is violating the civil rights of children with disabilities by illegally cutting the services that allow these kids to live at home rather than in institutions.

People need to understand how the alternative to health reform will actually function in the real world. We have the examples already in front of us.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Posted by Disability Mom at 11:22 AM

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About Me

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I'm the mom of a child with disabilities. Hannah's first neurologist said she might never develop beyond the level of a 2 month old infant, and there wasn't anything I could do about it. The brain damage was just too severe. Nine years later, she walks, uses a touchscreen computer and I've just been shown she can learn to construct sentences and do simple math with the right piece of technology. Along the way, I discovered I needed to teach myself what Hannah's rights to services really were. Learning about early intervention services led to reading about IDEA and then to EPSDT. I've been waiting for the Obama administration to realize the power and potential of EPSDT for the medical rights - including the right to stay at home with their families - of children with disabilities. The health reform people talk about long term care, and the disability people talk about education and employment, but nobody is talking about EPSDT. So I am.