Ticket to Work

The Health Benefits for Workers with Disabilities contracting with Valek & Co. to design and provide services relating to the recruiting, training and matching of mentors/mentorees for those interested in sharing their experience about rejoining the workforce. Included are two versions of recruitment letters, phone scripts, booklet and flyers. They received 23 mentor applications and 19 mentoree applications. Review the extensive training materials, exit surveys, and final reports.

Illinois has joined the national movement to help people with disabilities return to work. The new program called Health Benefits for Workers with Disabilities (HBWD) started providing medical benefits in January 2002. Visit their site which provides program information and statistics, application and instructions, brochure and radio ads, FAQs, presentation requests and links, E-Pay, eligibility requirements, premium cost & co-pays, Rx Buying Club, plus information in Español.

The DB 101 Training covers public and private health, benefit and employment programs and protections, Benefits Planning Calculators, plus other information and tools. Participants include benefits planners, non-profit and state agency employees. Cross agency trainees achieve an awareness level knowledge that youth and adults with disabilities can access and retain needed benefits when working. The training spans public and private health, benefit and employment programs and protections.

This website for workers and job seekers includes easy-to-read descriptions of state, federal, and private benefit programs, paginas en Español, life situation articles, a glossary and bulletin board. There is also an interactive tool that helps users predict what would happen to benefits, in a number of what if scenarios. Calculators included: the benefits to work, job to job, school and work, Medi-Cal for working disabled, and Plan for Achieving Self Support (PASS).

The Arkansas MIG grantees, the EmployAbility Project, developed a number of handouts and fact sheets to help medical professionals and counselors understand the program. Review the definition of working disabled and medically improved plus a fact sheet on Medicaid Screening for Working Disabled Medicaid.

To assist the CMS in monitoring the Medicaid Buy-In program, Mathematica has developed a series reports and policy briefs that present quantitative measures of participation in the program. For both the issue briefs and the statistical profile, researchers built a new longitudinal person-level database on Buy-In participants that contains information provided by the states as well as data from the SSI and SSDI programs and from Medicaid and Medicare programs.

The Center for Workers with Disabilities is a technical assistance center for states enhancing or developing employment supports programs for working persons with disabilities; most of the 30 plus states supported by the Center are supporting employment supports development with Medicaid Infrastructure Grant (MIG) funds established under the Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Improvement Act of 1999 (P.L. 106-170). Visit the website to learn more about the TA services, publications and events.

This report, the latest in a series on participation in the Medicaid Buy-In program, presents a snapshot of the program in 2005 that captures the interplay of policy features, enrollment trends, and participant characteristics that have made the program what it is today. Moving away from the aggregated data used in previous studies, the analysis for this report is based on individual-level data provided by states to CMS through “finder files.”

The Arkansas MIG grantees developed a number of resources to spread the word about the ways that people with a disability or severe long-term illness can work. The program designed brochures, posters, newspaper ads, coffee mugs, t-shirts, magnets, and table displays all designed for agency workers, consumers, advocates.

What are the steps of the hiring process? According to a training presentation from the Alaska MIG program, the four step process includes recruitment, interviewing, selection and retention. The slides cover ways to overcoming perceived barriers and the hiring process. The presentation also included an exercise and quiz.