Disability Rights Specialists Terrified After Donald Trump Becomes President
People that have disabilities and their closed ones are now really afraid of the Donald Trump presidency. They are now preparing to resist the likely harmful changes that will come under his term. Ari Ne’eman, Autistic Self Advocacy Network president, declared:
“It’s a disaster. Obviously, with someone like Trump, you never really know what he is going to do, but assuming we can take him at his word on his stated policy positions, there is tremendous, tremendous risk for people with disabilities.”
Up until now, Trump did not respond to the requests for comments about the concerns that disability rights advocates have. According to leading a leading disability lawyer, the concerns appeared when Serge Kovaleski, New York Times reporter was mocked at a Trump campaign meeting and when Trump declared that vaccines were causing autism. Combine this with the fact that the mogul went through 8 lawsuits because of not offering accommodations for disability people in some of this real estate properties and it is obvious that worrying is normal.
Obamacare Repealing
Trump promised numerous times that he will repeal Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act. Now we have a Republican control of both Congress houses so repealing Obamacare will be really easy to do. This repeal is going to drastically affect the life of people that live in the US with disabilities. It is possible that insurance companies will no longer cover people that have a pre-existing condition and this is just the start. University of Chicago professor Harold Pollack declared that the protections that will survive from Trump’s modifications of Obamacare will surely be just as inadequate and porous as what existed in the past.
Medicaid Modifications
At the moment, around 15% of people covered by Medicaid are disabled. Trump wants to modify the Medicaid system into a system based on flat annual funding amounts. This means that the flexibility that now exists with the system will no longer be in place. While it is completely unclear how Trump intends to structure a block-granting plan, the different ideas that have been expressed all lead to really low coverage rates.
Results
If we are to look at both the implementations being done under the Trump administration, we will see 30 million US citizens that are going to lose their health insurance. A really large part of them will be those that suffer from disabilities. The Americans that have disabilities and not rely on the Medicaid system are not going to find another coverage option.
The Trump DOJ is going to reverse or stall the progress made on making police accountable for what they do wrong. Half of the people that are killed every year by police officers are disabled. This does include the Eric Garner case, which did publicize the problems in the police actions in USA.
On the whole, the future of US citizens with disabilities and the impact from legislative changes is unclear. President elect Trump has indicated that he is in favor of continuing coverage for pre-existing conditions and eliminating this as a loophole for future health care reforms.
