WASHINGTON, May 24, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- A week before
the official start of the 2019 hurricane season, the National
Council on Disability (NCD)—an independent federal agency—today
released its latest report, titled, Preserving Our Freedom:
Ending Institutionalization of People with Disabilities During and
After Disasters.
NCD – which advises the President and Congress – examined
available data from several major storms and disasters and found
that people with disabilities are frequently institutionalized
during and after disasters due to conflicting federal guidance; a
lack of equal access to emergency and disaster-related programs and
services; and a lack of compliance with federal law.
Over 47 million people were impacted by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma
and Maria, and based on disability prevalence statistics, as many
as nearly 12 million of them may have been people with
disabilities.
The report, which focused on the reasons people with
disabilities experience involuntary institutionalization as a
result of disasters, found that the Federal Government offers
conflicting guidance on the topic. For example, Department of
Justice (DOJ) guidance states that "people should receive services
in the most integrated setting appropriate to the needs of the
person, and only persons who require the type and level of medical
care that would ordinarily be provided by trained medical personnel
in a nursing home or hospital" should be placed in those more
restrictive settings. In contrast, the Department of Health and
Human Services (HHS) Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
(CMS) repeatedly issues waivers to their institutional placement
rules during disasters, allowing states to place disaster-impacted
people with disabilities in nursing homes and other institutional
settings.
The report also found that recipients of federal funds do not
have training for how to comply with federal requirements to
provide equal access to emergency and disaster-related programs and
services when using federal dollars, nor do they have the cultural
competence to interact with people with disabilities and often
adhere to stereotypes and myths about disability that results in
institutional placement. As a result of unnecessary
institutionalizations of people with disabilities during and after
disasters, people with disabilities often go unaccounted for,
families are separated from loved ones, working individuals with
disabilities often become unemployed, and students with
disabilities are often excluded from returning to school with their
peers.
NCD's recommendations to policymakers include the following:
- Congress should require CMS to establish a process for Medicaid
portability among states and territories during disasters to ensure
uninterrupted health maintenance and medical care in the least
restrictive environment for Medicaid recipients.
- Congress should appropriate funds for FEMA, HHS, and HUD to
fund Independent Living Center staff and other affordable and
accessible housing experts to provide individual and household
disaster case management focused on the transition and permanent
housing needs of disaster-impacted people with disabilities.
- Congress should require that HHS establish a data collection
system and that data collection begins immediately after the next
federally declared disaster. The system must identify impacted
individuals moved to an institutional setting and quantify movement
and displacement of all impacted people in the aggregate.
- The U.S. Department of Education (ED) should issue a policy
directive to require school systems to include an individualized
emergency plan for uninterrupted delivery in every student's IEP or
504 plan to comply with the Free and Appropriate Public Education
requirement in IDEA and in the Rehabilitation Act.
- People with disabilities have a right to equal access to
emergency services. Registries have both impeded equal access
solutions and established inadequate alternatives for using federal
funds. NCD recommends that no federal funds, including but not
limited to federal funds from the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) and HHS, be used in development, deployment, and
maintenance of emergency 'special needs' registries intended to
include people with disabilities.
Read the full report at
https://ncd.gov/publications/2019/preserving-our-freedom.
NCD has a number of subject matter experts who experienced
recent disasters to provide on-the-ground context and stories
available for interviews. For more information, contact NCD Public
Affairs Specialist Nick Sabula at
nsabula@ncd.gov.
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SOURCE National Council on Disability