Stop Using People with Disabilities as the Poster Children for the Republican Attack on Healthcare

There has been a lot of misinformation and downright lies concerning the healthcare overhaul. Sarah Palin's usual inflammatory and inept speechifying reached a new level of obfuscation when she said there would be "death panels" to decide whether the elderly and disabled should live or die. Senator's Grassley's ratification of Palin's know-nothing statement only reinforced the level of Republican propagandizing around big lies.

Central to the big lies and smears is the constant invocation of people with disabilities. Everyone seems concerned that disabled patients would be terminated before the end of their natural lives. The reality is that health care bill allows insurance companies to reimburse patients who want to discuss whether or not to have living wills and how to structure those most effectively for the comfort zone of the person.

This rhetorical concern for the disabled is fascinating coming from the right, which has routinely worked against extending accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, saying that it would cost businesses too much to retrofit their environments.

But there are strange moments when the right and disability activists have become bedfellows. One was the controversy around Terri Schiavo, in which right-to-lifers joined with people concerned that the comatose patient was being deprived of life support because of her disability status. Another area has been assisted suicide, in which fundamentalists have held that no one should be allowed to take their own lives, and in which disability activists feel that given limited health resources the disabled will be pressured into assisted suicide by insurance companies and impatient doctors.

However, in the case of the health-care bill, there should be no such alliances. Everyone, disabled or not, should create a living will now when they are capable of doing so without confusion and not under the pressure of a serious illness.

It is important that people with disabilities speak out against being used as the negative poster children of the Republican's smear campaign. The reforms advocated in the health care bill would specifically benefit people with disabilities by stopping the current practice in which insurance companies can terminate people for their health status. As for living wills, if Terri Schiavo had made one, there would have been no controversy around her death.

Follow Lennard Davis on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lendavis

Comments

[Cynthia Gracey]

11:44 AM on 08/20/2009

I am disabled, It hurts just to wake up and walk every morning. Try to think through pain, try to think through pain killers, try to live and raise children either way, both are a lose lose, but try to live being disabled with no insurance company willing to insure you, ( THAT INCLUDES YOU AETNA, UNITEDHEALTH, BLUECROSS BLUESHIELD, CINERGY HEALTH) and I don't meet medicaid and medicare's criteria. Think added stress.
Give me a death panel option if you wont give me healthcare because my ability to pay for my medical needs is lessening as health care costs go up and heaven forbid I was hit by a meteorite or a mack truck, I would be bankrupt before I entered an ambulunce...so which is scarier for me??? MY CHILDREN ENDING UP WITH NOTHING BUT BILLS IS SCARIER THAN DEATH PANELS! So you and those like you vote to limit all disabled peoples benefits and now you think that the "term death panels" is scary? "death panels" are much scarier to people who are youngish, healthy and have no disability .
So is" death panels" the worse you can do??? ...
errrh i forgot. It's not, "HITLER!" is the worst you can do.
Well Hitler wanted everyone to be vegetarian so that's it on you Sarah Palin.
Why don't you shout SATAN which is what you really want to shout out anyway, but then that would reveal who you really are.
MEDICARE for everyone! What is so hard about this?

[PoggeB]

12:13 AM on 08/14/2009

In 2000 I was directing a family resource center. I made $13.00 and hour and had crappy benefits, but I loved my job. Our funding was cut when Bush was elected. In 2003 I was working with severely disabled people for $7.25 an hour and no benefits, but I loved my job. I left because the rumor was that if Bush was re-elected our funding and my job would be cut (they were) and we had just adopted a child.

Now I work for the Postal Service. I make $23.00 an hour and have the best freakin' bennies on the planet. Much of my job consists of redundant or superfluous paperwork and reports created by people who must justify their corporate exsistence while we at the bottom struggle to do our jobs with dwindling staff and increasing pressure from people with zero retail experience. I love my job because I am a working fool, but if I could afford to keep my present healthcare plan I would be back changing Depends for pennies or teaching parenting classes for peanuts in a heartbeat.

I envied the Germans their healthcare when we lived there. Still do. It p***** me off to hear people say we can't do it in America.

[live-aloha]

09:21 PM on 08/13/2009

I wonder what Eunice would thing of this woman. I would like to see Maria tell her to put a sock in it.

[NFS]

09:07 PM on 08/13/2009

I continue to be amazed at the hypocrisy and evil all to evident and on display among the conservative right, who profess to be doing God's work. As the concerned mother of a daughter with cerebral palsy, and a disability advocate, having living will is critical in the protection of my daughter's life. I abhor Palin's self serving use of her son, Trig's disability. Those of us who truly advocate for the disability community and who know how important preparing for life and death situations involving our family members with disabilities and their care givers, need to speak up and not let these people get away with what they're trying to do. We need to remember that the disability community were a healthy percentage of those who voted Obama into office and so far, his administration has put into place more provisions and programs to assist the disability community than any prior administration. Let's get more vocal than we ever have before and help cut through the bull crap by those who don't know what the hell they're talking about and don't care..

[nana4g]

08:43 PM on 08/13/2009

Perhaps, you can send a personalized copy of this article to Glenn Beck, who used his daughter with cerebral palsy as an example of one who would have been euthanized by the Nazis, as his crocodile tears poured down his face. Absent from his dissertation was the fact that his daughter, as are all disabled and special needs children and people, benefit from birth or time of disability, not from the private insurance industry, but from government "Socialist" programs, tax supported, such as Medicaid, Social Security, SSKI, Special Education, Respite Care, and Foster Home care for those children thrown away by their parents, regardless of family income, or none. The single qualifying factor for eligibility is the disability, the special needs factor. Instead of highlighting and acknowledging how important these programs have been to their own children, people like Glenn Beck are protesting the taxation, government intervention, and personal freedoms that were instrumental in guaranteeing his daughter's and children and people like her, ability to realize their God given potential.

[huffingt]

07:25 PM on 08/13/2009

Exploitation of innocent

[Tom Joad]

08:37 PM on 08/13/2009

...it's all they know...

[fem56]

04:53 PM on 08/13/2009

I have worked with people who are profoundly disabled. The idea that a death panel would be in place deciding that their life is not worth living is abhorant but Sarah Palin KNOWs that is not what these meetings are all about. As a Christian surely she would want people to be able to meet their maker when they are ready and not linger on because someone else wants them to linger on beyond reason. As a fiscally conservative republican surely she must not want the government or the family to waste money ware housing people. Not everyone wants every last treatment and surgery possible when they have a terminal illness. People ought to be given the opportunity to choice when they are still able.

[steppenwolfsayshi]

03:00 PM on 08/13/2009

....you know, even though a lot of the Republican talk about euthansia is self-serving political spin, as a disabled person I don't mind it too much. I don't have a disability that you can see and so I know how some people really think about disabled people. I've had people tell me that they thought healthcare for disabled people was a waste of money and that the fact that we were extending the lives of so many disabled people through medical advances was lowering the percentage of genetically "good" people and would lead to more disabled people. In college, my university instituted a new policy that students had to attend class as a portion of their grade (some profs followed it, some not), which was a problem for me, of course. Even though I could make A's on all the tests, I had more than one professor tell me that if you couldn't meet the requirements, you didn't belong in college and should consider doing something else. I was a National Merit semi-finalist.
People's opinion of the disabled is probabled not as advanced as you'd like to think.

[bitohistory]

05:55 PM on 08/13/2009

Thank you! From my heart.

[NHGranite]

02:37 PM on 08/13/2009

Today there is a public service for a real advocate for the disabled, Eunice Kennedy Shriver. She never used her sister's handicap as an excuse to scare people, but to enlighten them. What she did for the mentally handicapped is inestimable. That she could expand that to make sure that all disabled people could have a public life is world-changing. One person made a positive difference. What in inspiration. Sarah, are you listening?

[bitohistory]

05:59 PM on 08/13/2009

Has Sarah even made a peep about the Dear Ms. Eunice?

[tcastillo]

07:31 PM on 08/13/2009

Please don''t encourage her to open her mouth. It would not be about the grace of Eunice, but about Sarah.

[momcat4obama]

09:40 PM on 08/13/2009

probably doesn't even know who she is.

[steppenwolfsayshi]

02:35 PM on 08/13/2009

As a disabled person, I strongly support living wills and designating someone as a medical power of attorney. I think they are a great thing because like the author said, they give me the ability to choose what will happen to me at the end of my life if I am not able to tell anyone anymore. My parents are divorced and I am not married, but I've chosen that my mother would be able to make final judgements about ending my life, because I don't trust my father's judgement. It gives the disabled more rights, not less. Even if you're not disabled, you should have one. Making these documents is scary, but its important.

I couldn't honestly say that I think Republicans are trying to just using disabled people though or that there's any getting through to them.

[stagebandman]

02:00 PM on 08/13/2009

I think we could counteract the rhetoric on their side by simply giving it the right name. Nobody could argue with "The Patriot Act" without seeming unpatriotic. So, how about the heath care bill being named:

THE AMERICAN LIVES ACT!

Maybe it'll shut some people up.

[Cynthia Gracey]

03:15 PM on 08/20/2009

grea