If you have a physical disability, it really sucks to be poor. And, if you're well-off, by whatever standards you care to impose, good services and appropriate equipment can make quantum differences in a crip's quality of life.
You may be saying, "duh". But I mean that it really does suck more to be poor if you have a significant physical disability, and it can even become, literally, a matter of life and death.
By disability-standards, I'm wealthy, and I still can't afford a ramp van and have to postpone and somehow finance putting a lift or a ramp on my mobile home. [The city in which I reside has a program through which they will put a lift or a ramp onto your home for free, but my income exceeds the cutoff for this benefit. This is a not-uncommon Catch 22 of us "overachieving" crips.
I do have group health insurance which pays for a quality power wheelchair and its maintenance. I have this because I have a job in a large organization which can afford to offer quality (increasingly a misnomer) health care options to its employees. I have this job chiefly because a) I'm at the top of the persons with disabilities food chain in terms of experience and education; b) I got recruited for this job by someone (who decided I was Satan's Spawn later, but that's another story; and c) I'm really, really good at what I do.
And yes, I'm lucky.
So I lead into this article by Marta Russell, who published this on Znet:
http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/Content/2005-09/25russell.cfm
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1 comment:
It's great to hear that you do have health coverage as it is a great aspect to life.
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