Along with the passage of the ADA, another piece of legislation passed about the same time (The Civil Rights Act of 1991) guarantees PWDs the same Constitutional protections as minorities – specifically that they are worth the full “value” of a white man.
The Act was originally passed in the Reconstruction Era and until 1991 only applied to minorities. Ever afterwards, it also applied to the PWD community, even though legal challenges if not a broad understanding of the statute remains oblique and largely untested.
What the statute also essentially does is address not only the “contractual worth” of PWDs, it also ostensibly creates economic “rights” or an economic “floor” for PWDs. This means that, for example, a PWD may not be hired at less than the minimum wage (for example).
What it also does, however, is create mandates for the government where goods and services vital to maintaining that “contractual” worth are provided to this community.
Starting with, of course, healthcare.
While a great many of the failings of the ADA remain to be addressed thanks to aggressive federal push back in the courts (for example), one of the most instructive things to come out of the last twenty years of litigation under the Act was attempts to “define” a covered disability.
The ADA Restoration Act will address many of these issues, we hope, but taking from that line of reasoning, we contend that in fact, since so many people with disabilities require medication to manage their disabilities so as to not meet the federal standards of being “disabled” that this is actually a very interesting legal space right now. Specifically, using that logic, a person with a disability who can manage their disability with medication (starting with diabetes) is therefore guaranteed a certain “floor” of medical service. Without such service (including access to medication, regardless of the ability to pay), such a person very well may be “disabled.” With it, they will be a PWD, able to take their rightful place in society in every place the “able-bodied” now participate. As such, the state has a vested interest if not obligation (starting with a fiscal one if not a civil rights based one) to insure, if not is forced to require, unimpeded access for every PWD to state provided medication to preserve their “contractual value.”
We realize that for the non legal eagles reading this, this may all sound like complicated legal mumbo jumbo.
However in the middle of budget battles, from the federal to the state level, we think this is an important point to raise.
Particularly as we have a service provision model which not only addresses it but creates a very powerful “fix” that will reverberate both directly on the bottom line and in indirect costs that we anticipate will become increasingly obvious as we begin service provision.
Freedom Riders 