The American Rescue Plan passed its final vote in the House yesterday, on a 220-211 vote along strict party lines. President Biden signed it this afternoon. The plan’s best-known feature, a third round of economic stimulus checks to individuals and families, will start going out almost immediately. The bill seems to have strong support, not just among Democrats and Independents, but from a substantial percentage of Republican voters as well.
This is a major political victory for the new Biden Administration. And as many economists say, (though not all of them), the bill looks to be an essential toolbox for Covid-19 pandemic relief and economic recovery. This massive $1.9 trillion package is also a significant win for disabled people in the U.S., though it won’t deliver all that the disability community had hoped for.
Here is an overview of the main components of this third round of Covid relief, what is in it for people with disabilities, and what was set aside for another day.
Stimulus Checks
The most immediately impactful piece for most Americans is the third round of economic stimulus checks – $1,400 for individuals with incomes up to $75,000, and $2,800 for couples earning up to $150,000. There will also be an additional $1,400 for each dependent claimed on tax returns.
In the two previous stimulus bills, only dependents under age 17 qualified for payments. This bill adds adult dependents, including adult children with disabilities and older parents with age-related disabilities who are claimed on someone else’s income tax returns. So a significant number of disabled people who didn’t qualify for previous stimulus checks will get this one. This provision will help those disabled individuals, and the families they live with.
Stimulus checks are not solely targeted to disabled people. But extra money is always a help, especially for people with disabilities, and particularly when it doesn’t affect eligibility for key disability-related benefits like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare.
The quick, one-time influx of cash can help people with disabilities pay for expenses that come with our disabilities, and any costs that we have struggled to meet during the financial disruptions of the pandemic. For example:
- Buying higher quality protective masks and cleaning supplies. These are still important as too many of us are still waiting to be eligible for vaccines. We need them for ourselves of course, but many of us who use home care also need them for our everyday direct care workers.
- Overdue repair or replacement of adaptive equipment, like wheelchairs, walkers, hearing aids, and the dozens of apps and tools disabled people increasingly rely on that are based on home PCs and mobile devices.
- Basic groceries we may have skimped on or gone without, that we can now buy in bulk, like toilet paper and paper towels, small but important luxuries like coffee and favorite snacks, and prepared foods with a long shelf life.
Plus, many of us can usefully use stimulus funds to pay down debt, which can improve our overall financial stability and open up more purchasing power we can use in future emergencies.
Home and Community-Based Services
State and local services that help disabled people live independently outside of congregate care facilities will receive a long overdue and critical boost through the bill’s $350 billion in aid to states and localities.
Increased Federal funding to state and local governments will go a long way towards reducing states’ budget shortfalls and helping them avoid deep and damaging service cuts at this point in the pandemic and recovery. One of the most critical types of services under threat for the last year has been Home and Community Based Services.
Home and Community Based Services is an umbrella term for a variety of services provided to many individuals with disabilities on a more or less regular basis to help us live independently in our own homes rather than congregate care facilities. HCBS services can include home care and personal assistance, home accessibility modifications, and help for people transitioning out of nursing homes, group homes, and other more supervisory facilities into more independent homes and communities.
These services are mostly provided by locally or regionally-based nonprofit organizations, supervised by state and local governments, and funded jointly by state and federal government, through Medicaid and Medicare. The scope and emphasis on these services varies from state to state. In some, most disabled people who need everyday help are able to get help in their own homes, while other states rely more heavily on nursing homes and other institutions. However, in every state it has been a constant struggle to ensure strong funding for HCBS.
During the pandemic, this struggle has intensified, as state budgets were thrown out of balance, threatening or resulting in steep cuts in support for home care and community independence, even as the dangers of being stuck in congregate care like nursing homes during a pandemic made horrific headlines.
The first two Covid relief bills failed to provide additional funding to help states maintain and expand HCBS services. This despite the fact that expanding care at home options is an effective way to reduce nursing home and group home populations and remove more disabled people from immediate risk of deadly infection. By finally helping states shore up their budgets and revive support for HCBS, we may be able to help more elderly and disabled people live back in their own homes, and escape not just the short-term risk of Covid-19, but future waves of infectious disease and the increasingly apparent everyday dangers and harms of America’s congregate care facilities.
Special Education
90% of the $128 billion in the bill for education is allocated to local school expenses. This includes help for general education, including costs of reopening schools safely, and addressing learning setbacks resulting from the pandemic-related disruptions of the last year. The bill also specifically allocates over $3 billion in additional funding for Special Education activities and services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, (IDEA)
The pandemic has been particularly difficult for disabled students. Many of them had more difficulty than most students using remote learning, which can be difficult to adapt to specific disabilities and learning differences. And students who typically rely on one-on-one aides while in school generally had to go without when schools were closed.
Schools that remain closed for awhile longer will be able to use funding from the bill to improve accessibility and effectiveness of remote learning. Meanwhile, schools can prepare for a much safer and welcoming return to in-school learning for all students, including students with disabilities.
No End to Subminimum Wage
One of the disability community’s brightest hopes for the American Rescue Plan was that it originally included a federally-mandated phaseout of subminimum wage for disabled workers. Unfortunately, like the proposed gradual increase in the Minimum Wage to $15 per hour, ending the subminimum wage was determined by the Senate Parliamentarian to be outside the scope of “reconciliation,” the workaround used in the Senate to pass the larger bill by a simple majority by avoiding a filibuster.
As journalist Sara Luterman explains in The Nation:
“Under regulation 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, disabled people can legally be paid pennies an hour, with little federal change since then. During the campaign, President Biden promised to phase out subminimum wage, and prior to minimum-wage changes being drowned in the Byrd-bath, he was well on his way to delivering.”
Luterman further notes that banning or phasing out subminimum wage is already happening in several states, and that it has been building fairly strong bipartisan support in recent years. On the other hand, it’s still seen as something of a niche issue, and as it gets closer to happening, opposition may intensify and become more partisan.
Being dropped from the stimulus bill is far from the end of the story. Inclusion in the original stimulus plan briefly held out hope for disability activists that we might be able to avoid years more of frankly tiresome arguments on this subject. Now the disability community faces more protracted work and persuasion to the long overdue reform done. It remains to be seen whether this is a genuine setback, or an opportunity to pass an even stronger, stand-alone ban that includes better support to ease the transition to fairer pay.
Other Features
The American Relief Plan includes many other funding and emergency economic measures that aren’t designed just for disabled people, but will be of critical help to many of us. This includes:
- Continuing $300 per week unemployment payments through September 6, and making the first $10,200 “nontaxable” this year for households earning under $150,000.
- Increasing the Child Tax Credit to $3,000 per child this year for kids aged 6-17, and to $3,600 for kids under 6.
- Enhancing the Earned Income Tax Credit, (EITC) this year for people without children.
- Increasing Affordable Care Act subsidies, making it easier for more people to buy health insurance on the ACA marketplace.
- Funding for small businesses and also nonprofit organizations aimed at keeping workers employed and paid.
- Increasing funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, (LIHEAP), and for various food and nutrition funding, including Women, Infants, and Children, (WIC) and “Food Stamps,” the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, (SNAP).
- $25 billion more for emergency rental assistance.
Disabled people don’t just benefit only from disability-targeted programs.
What benefits families with children benefits disabled people who have kids. What benefits people who have lost jobs benefits disabled people who have lost jobs. More ways to access affordable health care will help at least some disabled people who have been unable to access affordable health care. 20% of SNAP recipients are disabled, so a boost in SNAP funding and scope will benefit a lot of people with disabilities. Help for people who work, but still have lower incomes, like improvements in the Earned Income Tax Credit and higher subsidies for health insurance, will end up helping a great many people who have disabilities and work, but still struggle to thread the needle between modest earnings from their labor, and eligibility for disability-related benefits they simply can’t do without or replace on their own.
Close examination of this enormous and multipart bill demonstrates how all issues are disability issues, and how supportive economic policies in general are beneficial to disabled people, both directly and indirectly. At the same time, it shows how disabled people’s unique and very specific needs can and should be addressed within the parameters of a bill affecting all Americans.
It also reminds us that enacting some of the disability community’s most long-term and deepest priorities will never be easy, even under the most politically promising circumstances. This may be especially true when there are so many informal and semi-formal blockages in our politics and lawmaking systems themselves, most notably the filibuster.
Making more fundamental changes, like ending subminimum wage, or drastically changing the landscape on health care or home care, may get harder in the year term. They will have to be argued on their own merits, and relatively few of our fellow citizens understand disability issues very well. Disability activists may need to redirect at least some of our focus towards repairing the structure, health, and efficiency of our democracy itself.
In the meantime, after almost a year of relative neglect, signficant short-term help for disabled people is finally on the way.
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March 12, 2021 at 02:08AM
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How Covid Relief Will Help Disabled People, And What Was Left Out - Forbes
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