The Disabled Are Bound by Chain of Unemployment

The increasing unemployment of Americans with disabilities during what we are told is a booming employment era is not so puzzling if we look a little closer. Legislation passed earlier this month by the Senate seeks to attack one perceived cause. By retaining coverage of Medicare and Medicaid--the latter known as MediCal in California--for those who take jobs, the law is aimed at getting more people with disabilities to seek employment and move off Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, and Supplemental Security Disability Insurance, or SSDI.

The fear of losing full medical coverage is important. But this law only fixes one link in the chain of unemployment for disabled people. There are still many broken links. There has been a 70% increase of those on SSI and SSDI in the last four years.

Since the highly touted Americans with Disabilities Act passed nearly a decade ago, supposedly offering new protections for the disabled, things have worsened significantly.

Sure there are more curb cuts at street corners and more buildings and toilets are accessible, but in places like California, the disabled are more penniless than when this so-called civil rights law for the disabled was enacted. During the Clinton administration, unemployment of working-age people with disabilities has soared from a horrendous 66% to a disastrous 75%. For those with severe disabilities, for example those who cannot walk, the unemployment rate, once 87%, is rising.

For the vast majority of the disabled, their income comes from SSI, essentially federal welfare payments for those who never worked, or SSDI, based on past employment. In California, these payments have been reduced 20% over the past decade by Republican administrations in Sacramento and the failure of the new Democrat-dominated Legislature and administration to breathe a word about making up for the cuts in this flush (for others) economy.

At the same time, over the last two decades, federal commitment to housing subsidies has drastically withered. Without subsidy programs such as Section 8, for which there is now a 16-year waiting list in Los Angeles and no preference for disabled people, most disabled people have the choice of eating or having a roof over their heads.

A look at the state Department of Rehabilitation is equally depressing. Having cut to shreds its higher education program for the disabled--the only kind of education that will allow access to an adequate income for those with costly disabilities--it directs its academically capable applicants to underpaid jobs or low-cost community colleges. There, they find the hands-on training facilities that these two-year colleges specialize in to be woefully inaccessible to those with physical disabilities.

To add to the barriers the disabled face in moving into the mainstream, the living wages and benefits of many jobs have deteriorated, along with their permanence.

The coup de grace has been the gross underenforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Private employers, frightened into thinking they have no recourse, seek ways to avoid the law or just choose to not hire the disabled. The government compounds the problem by failing to actively enforce the law.

Since the Americans with Disabilities Act became law, the media have ignored the material problems of the disabled. Other than attention to whether disabled people should be assisted in suicide, opinion pages have seen no discussion of disabilities issues. Practical issues such as the deterioration of their real position in the economy have been ignored.

After a decade of disregard, President Clinton has now proposed a tax credit of $1,000 for the disabled or their families to be used for educational expenses. What good is a tax credit for the disabled, who increasingly have no taxable income?

Without a more systemic approach to the worsening state of the disabled, 50 million disabled Americans will continue to sink deeper into poverty, frustration and dependency, and the taxpayer will continue to stagger under billions of dollars of unnecessary support for the disabled.