Resolutions for the new U.S. Congress

Pelosi was signed in as House Speaker today -- exciting and historic, that. I don't have much faith in her "100 hours" plan because the most important topics for this new Congress to address are too complicated to solve so quickly, but I do have hope for the year. Disability issues top the list of concerns Pelosi and the Democrats need to address:

1) Ending war and increasing peace in Iraq and Afghanistan -- From a purely economic perspective, responsible health care for injured American military personnel already endangers all of us:

More than 1.4 million U.S. soldiers have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since late 2001, and about 26 percent have filed disability claims, according to raw data provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs. That percentage could grow as soldiers leave the armed forces.

''I see the whole thing as a mini-Medicare, another huge entitlement program, which is going to be sprawling out over the course of our lifetimes and our children's lifetimes,'' said Linda Bilmes, a Harvard University public finance professor and co-author of the Stiglitz study. "The big costs come when they get back . . . they stand a good chance of being really underfunded and not taken care of properly.''

Veterans groups worry that they'll be forced to compete with other government programs for funds. Not enough attention is being given to the future mental health and medical needs of Iraq and Afghanistan war vets, they say, especially given how those wars differ from previous ones.

This doesn't even count the much higher costs to Iraqis, with civilians dying from non-war-related, preventable health conditions now due to an almost total lack of access to medical care:

Zainab may be one of the 655,000 Iraqis who would be alive today if the Bush administration hadn't launched its criminally conceived and executed war. Violence caused most of the excess deaths. But 54,000 people died from non-violent causes, such as heart disease, cancer and chronic illness. They were victims of a health care system eviscerated by mismanagement, ill-placed priorities, corruption and civil war.

PetitPoussin comments on another tragic example here.

Congress' number one priority needs to be working honestly to end this conflict. Our job is to make them keep at it until it's done.

2) Universal healthcare and Medicare policy reform -- From the corrupt Republican Part D drug plan to federal requirements for proof of citizenship, recent reforms have complicated health care for thousands of Medicare recipients and shut others out altogether. Not to mention the over 46 million Americans who remain completely uninsured.

3) ADA Restoration Act -- Okay, this doesn't sound nearly as urgent as the two problems above -- and it isn't. Except that the war and increasing lack of health care contribute to the number of Americans with disabilities who must rely on the anti-discrimination law to remain a productive part of society. With Mark Foley and his vendetta against the ADA gone, Democrats have a chance to truly support disabled people by bolstering the ADA against further beatings from the Supreme Court.

House Democrat Steny Hoyer in 2004 speaking at the Tony Coelho Lecture in Disability Employment Law and Policy at the New York Law School:

When we wrote the ADA, we intentionally used a definition of disability that was broad -- borrowing an existing definition from the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

We did this because the courts had generously interpreted this definition in the Rehabilitation Act. And, we thought using established language would help us avoid a potentially divisive political debate over the definition of "disabled."

Therefore, we could not have fathomed that people with diabetes, epilepsy, heart conditions, cancer and mental illnesses would have their ADA claims kicked out of court because, with medication, they would be considered too functional to meet the definition of "disabled." Nor could we have fathomed a situation where an individual may be considered too disabled by an employer to get a job, but not disabled enough by the courts to be protected by the ADA from discrimination.

The .pdf file of Hoyer's speech is locked from copying and pasting here, but I encourage you to follow the link and read the four principles he gives for the restoration of the ADA that Congressional action can provide. Briefly, these are 1) restate Congressional intent, 2) focus the law on discrimination and not details of an individual's disability, 3) disallow the courts' argument that disabled people must be saved from harming themselves, and 4) reassert that accommodation means finding solutions together rather than creating an adversarial relationship between employers and employees.

That's my short list of work for the new Congress to tackle. Not too much to ask.