Here are your hree disability-related links for Tuesday, May 7, 2024.
1. Ministers seek to overhaul disability benefits system
Alice Evans,Munaza Rafiq, BBC - April 29, 2024
“Disabled people could face major changes to how the personal independence payments (PIP) benefit works, as the government tries to tackle the rising number of claimants with a mental health condition.”
2. Ministers are callous and clueless on Pip payments
Letters, The Guardian - May 3, 2024
“Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the government has continued to attack ‘mental health culture’ (Mentally ill people being used as ‘political football’, campaigners say, 29 April). The publication of its disability green paper, in which the government says it wants to move away from financial support for those with mental health conditions given through personal independence payment (Pip), is greatly concerning. It comes after the prime minister labelled the UK as being amid a ‘sicknote culture’ and said that society shouldn’t be ‘over-medicalising the everyday challenges and worries of life’ by diagnosing them as mental health conditions.”
From my perspective here in the U.S., it looks like once again the U.K. is having a sharper, more explicit policy debate about something that’s more like a low-grade gripe here. It’s the idea, or stereotype, that way too many people with ordinary problems and worries are claiming to have mental health disabilities these days. It’s an idea that’s hard not to wonder about now and then. But it’s also fairly easy to refute, or at least see quite differently from a different angle.
A decade or so ago, the U.K. government was revamping its disability payment systems too, partially in response to a sort of fever of largely manufactured outrage about “benefits scroungers,” people flat-out faking disabilities and refusing to work. There was a similar panic here in the U.S. at about the same time, when Social Security Disability reserves got really low for awhile. But efforts to drum up this “concern” into harmful changes never went very far. Maybe we should be glad that once in awhile, political polarization, dysfunction, and gridlock makes it hard to do bad things as well as good in U.S. politics. If we were able to change important policy and support systems in response to every new moral panic, conditions would be even worse than they already are for disabled people, and other marginalized groups too.
3. Conduct Polling Place Accessibility Audits in Your Community
American Association of People with Disabilities - May 6, 2024
“Despite federal laws that require polling places to be accessible; voters with disabilities continue to experience barriers on election day. In 2016, the Government Accountability Office found that 60 percent of polling places had at least one problem that made them inaccessible.”
Here is something disabled people and people who want to be disability rights allies can actually, feasibly do, to make a difference. Either check out the accessibility of your polling places yourself, or better yet, connect with others who can cover more polling places in an area. Find and join a local effort — such as a local Center for Independent Living or other disability organization — or form a team yourself. Make a plan. Get the toolkit. Use it as soon as polling places are set for upcoming elections. Report accessibility problems to your local board of elections. And report overall results of your surveys so we get a better picture of voting accessibility in the U.S. So many of us struggle to know how we can help make life better for disabled people. This is one practical, concrete thing nearly anyone can do.
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