Community Inclusion

What significance does employment hold for women with disabilities? What is known and unknown about these women? This issue of “Impact” answers these questions with articles by women with disabilities and researchers. Issues covered include self-employment, mentoring, transition planning, disparities across ethnic groups, and career development. Several women with disabilities who are successful artists, scientists, educators and entrepreneurs are profiled.

How can you shape programs and direct funds to use the power of self-direction in employment programs? This resource presents two examples of states that have achieved this. It also discusses characteristics of and barriers to facilitating consumer direction in employment.

Is your area a livable community? You can use this survey and accompanying reports as a model for finding out. AARP defines a livable community as one that allows people to maintain their independence and quality of life as they age and retire. Aspects that make a community livable include mobility, community supports, and affordable housing. Residents age 45 years and older in two OH counties were surveyed to measure whether these things are truly available in their communities.

This report provides a summary of how long-term services and supports (LTSS) are financed and describes factors that contribute to uncertainty of the future costs for LTSS, including changes in how LTSS will be delivered. Three projections of future LTSS spending for senior populations under different scenarios are offered. These scenarios differ based on projecting the number of people with varying functional limitations and the resulting need for varying degrees of LTSS.

This brief, the eighth in a series on working with disability, looks at the employment outcomes of participants in CommonHealth Working (CHW), Massachusetts’s Medicaid Buy-In program. Differences in post-enrollment employment rates, monthly hours worked and earnings, and private health insurance coverage are compared between new CHW enrollees previously covered by MassHealth, Massachusetts’s Medicaid program, and those without prior MassHealth coverage.

Here is a one stop resource of documents and history related to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and the ADA Amendments Act of 2008 (ADAAA). In addition to the text, summary, and legislative history of the laws, you can find advocacy resources, news and analysis. The attached article serves as a general summary of the history of the ADA and the effort to restore its original intent of achieving full civil rights for people with disabilities through the ADAAA.

Watch employers attest to how their business’ needs are met by skills that workers with developmental disabilities have brought to the workplace. The five firms included in the video found that those skills are crucial as they convert to computerized record systems in order to increase efficiency and drive down record keeping costs.

The Easter Seals Project ACTION commissioned this report to make the use of mobility devices in transportation safer and easier. A diverse advisory group used several research methods to create best practices in vehicle and equipment design, wheelchair design and usage, transit operations and training, and policy. The appendices provide links to regulatory sources and sample brochures. Riders, manufacturers, transit operators, researchers, and policymakers may all find this useful.

The Medicaid Buy-In (MBI), Social Security Disability Income (SSDI), and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs all provide workers with disabilities options to maintain health coverage if they earn too much for Medicaid or Medicare benefits. The first issue brief explains how these programs compare and interact in terms of eligibility, coverage, populations, and enrollment. The second examines how MBI participants that collect SSDI utilize SSDI work incentives.

Answering the question posed in the title is one key to evaluating Medicaid Buy-In (MBI) programs. This issue brief, the fifth in a series on workers with disabilities, compares demographics, health status, and expenditures between these groups. Significant areas of difference that were identified are race, gender, diagnoses, and expenditures.