How Inclusive Rhetoric for Exclusive Policy and Budget Benefit Civic Process Distortion Worked to Favor 'low functioning' Autistics Leaving 'higher functioning' Autistics Perpetually Underserved

Updated March 31, 2017 to correct dollar amount of Medicaid cuts in AHCA that was not voted on March 24, 2017 because Republican whip counts (vote projections) likely could not pass the Republican majority federal House of Representatives.



  State Developmental Disability councils, recommended in the "Welcome to the Autistic Community" paper,



There are also federal and state entities designed to help autistic adults, such as your state's developmental disabilities council. You can find your state's council here: http://www.nacdd.org/about-nacdd/councils-on- developmental-disabilities.aspx. Some state councils may be able to assist in extreme situations; however, councils are not expected to provide individualized services to people.
There are more services for Autistic adults than ever before. However, with our advocacy efforts, more and better services can exist in the future.


Your full participation and pro-active approach toward your own life path can ensure a promising, H.O.P.E.F.U.L future!




 usually ration the tax-funded assistance they recommend be provided, as policy recommendations, to people diagnosed with autism and ID formerly known as MR.  


Compounding 2008-2011 austerity after the Wall Street mortgage lending crash the 'sequester bill' of 2011 cut public services for autistic adults further with little restoration since the 2014 and 2016 Congresses.  Fewer resources are available for 'utilization' in the 'hopeful' acronym/meme if an autistic has trouble paying the costs in money.  


From the "Welcome to the Autistic Community" paper adult version:

Autism has given many of us the gift of dedication. Personal success is promising when our dedicated focus is placed on our personal strengths, talents, and special interests.

Utilize Available Resources.

Do you prefer group outings? Informative books? Online forums? Conferences? Explore and find what options work best for you, then utilize those resources for your advantage.

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=1214


http://www.disabilityscoop.com/2013/03/05/disability-cuts-stay/17424/

As sweeping federal budget cuts set in, the impact is starting to become clear for those benefiting from special education and other disability programs.
President Barack Obama issued an order late Friday instituting what’s known as sequestration, a process of deep spending cutbacks that was triggered when Congress failed to reach a budget deal in 2011. While both Democrats and Republicans insisted that they did not want to see sequestration take effect, the parties were not able to reach a deal to avert the cuts.Accordingly, some $85 billion will be trimmed from this year’s federal budget, touching nearly all military and domestic programs. Funding will be reduced for numerous initiatives benefiting those with disabilities including special education, housing assistance, employment supports, mental health services and research. Medicaid and Social Security benefits are some of the few areas to be spared.  

Because of ASAN commendable 'self' (more accurately many 'selves') -advocacy the sub-minimum wages paid to workers with ID, formerly MR, have risen to the Federal employee and contractor minimum wage of $10.10/hour unless Pres. Don Trump (D'ump) has reversed the executive order, if the 'sheltered workshop' wasn't closed.  The AHCA (repeal and replacement of the ACA that was pulled from voting on March 24, 2017 would have cut Medicaid by $880 billion dollars over 10 years to pay for tax cuts for the rich as part of a 'block grant' to states scheme to shift the budget cuts to the state level.  The disability rights constituency/community would have been unfortunately divided state by state instead of remaining unified as a national advocacy 'single' 'voice.'  


In a commercial park near Mechanicsburg, some 200 people with intellectual disabilities work as fast and hard as their abilities permit.
They also strain against a hard free-market reality: They get paid for what they produce.
As a result, most earn less than minimum wage, and some earn only $2 or $3 an hour.


At the S. Wilson Pollock Center for Industrial Training, Brian Marks gathers armloads of cardboard, dumps it into a bin and rolls it away for disposal.
 
Or read the content at this link


  Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA) gave little policy specifics and fails to answer the question how will children with Down's Syndrome/ID live at 66, as well as others with less severe developmental disabilities, live with as much life satisfaction from personally meaningful activity, if not income if they can't work for it to a middle class living standard, as she describes her son's life at 6 w/o the Class Act but with the Able Act her campaign donors will enrich by her Congressional career and possible lobbying career, as well as her husband's potential lobbying career, later.

excerpts from the 2014 #SOTU Republican response with same "hopeful" word and rhetoric that the ASAN paper turned into an acronym:



Tonight the president made more promises that sound good but won’t actually solve the problems facing Americans. We want you to have a better life. The president wants that too. But we part ways when it comes to how to make that happen. So tonight I’d like to share a more hopeful Republican vision, one that empowers you, not the government. It’s one that champions free markets and trusts people to make their own decisions, not a government that decides for you. It helps working families rise above the limits of poverty and protects our most vulnerable, and it’s one where Washington plays by the same rule that you do. It’s a vision that is fair and offers the promise of a better future for every American.


If you would have told me as a little girl that I would one day put my hand on the Bible and be sworn in as the 200th woman to serve in the House of Representatives, I wouldn’t have thought it possible. I grew up working on my family’s orchard and fruit stand in Kettle Falls, a small town in eastern Washington, getting up before dawn with my brother to pick apples.

My dad drove a school bus and my mom worked as a part-time bookkeeper. They taught me to work hard, help others, and always, always dream for more.

So, when I showed my 4H animals at the county fair, my parents used to say to me, “Cathy, you need to save this money so you can go to college one day!” And so I did -- I saved, I worked hard, and I became the first in my family to graduate from college.

The chance to go from my Washington to this one was unexpected. I came to Congress to help empower people, not politicians; to grow the working middle class, not the government; and to ensure that everyone in this country can find a job. Because a job is so much more than a paycheck: It gives us purpose, dignity and the foundation to build a future.

I was single when I was elected -- but it wasn’t long before I met Brian, a retired Navy commander, and now we have three beautiful children, one who was born just eight weeks ago.

Like all parents, we have high hopes and dreams for our children. But we also know what it’s like to face challenges. Three days after our son was born, Cole, we got news no parent expects. Cole was diagnosed with Down syndrome. The doctors told us he could have endless complications, heart defects, even early Alzheimer’s. They told us all the problems.

But when we looked at our son, we saw only possibilities. We saw a gift from God. And today we see a 6-year-old boy who dances to Bruce Springsteen; who reads above grade level; and who is the best big brother in the world.

We see all the things he can do, not those he can’t.

And Cole, and his sisters, Grace and Brynn, have only made me more determined to see the potential in every human life, that whether we’re born with an extra 21st chromosome or without a dollar to our name, we are not defined by our limits, but by our potential, because our mission, not only as Republicans, but as Americans, is to once again to ensure that we are not bound by where we come from, but empowered by what we can become. That is the gap Republicans are working to close. It’s the gap we all face: between where you are and where you want to be.

The President talks a lot about income inequality, but the real gap we face today is one of opportunity inequality. And with this Administration’s policies, that gap has become far too wide. We see this gap growing every single day. We see it in our neighbors who are struggling to find jobs, a husband who’s now working just part-time, a child who drops out of college because she can’t afford tuition, or parents who are outliving their life’s savings.


  Other people with disabilities, who are not 'graded' 'severely disabled' by eligibility criteria for assistance with paying monetary costs of inclusion of people with disabilities,  are left on their own. Whether the rejected or wait-listed safety net services applicant even has a disability is questioned, shamed, demonized, delegitimized with double standards regarding whether public money is necessary to pay the costs of community living that a person with a disability cannot pay themselves.   



  Whether disclosure is moot or a choice to disclose, or not, is necessary, the question both the ASAN paper and Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA) forgot in her 2014 #SOTU response, is how a person with a disability is helped to live independently in inclusive community settings (based on a 'severity contest'/'oppression olympics' of issues lived with that Republicans and neoliberal Democrats divide the disabled community with) and who pays the costs if the person with a disability and their friends and family (private resources) cannot pay.  Some self-advocates would call that statement 'disrespectful' or 'bigoted against autistics' to then assess  

 (the process of assessment becomes the new dispute and distraction from doing most self-defined good for the most autistic people at the fastest systemic pace with acceptance of individual variation)

the long term body of research and how many people have benefited from the body of research over a 10 or 20 year time frame.  

  The Autistic self-advocacy community is unfortunately replicating the SPMI/mental health/behavioral health/substance use and addiction consumer/survivor community's narrow impact long-term in the behavioral/mental health community supported by entities such as SAMSHA, the National Empowerment Center, the Connecticut Center on Addiction and Recovery CCAR, the Copeland Center and other peer and life, or recovery, coach accreditation sources questioned in the books "Sham how the self help and actualization movement made America helpless" by Steve Salerno and PC MD by Sally Satel  that Steve Salerno cites.


   Both books ignore private insurer and social liberal-fiscal conservative (neoliberals in both major USA political parties as well as 'independents') taxpayer greed facilitating drug and device symptom treatment rather than long-term person-centered treatment with LTSS delivered in HCBS settings.  Doctors and other health care providers try to provide health care by making up, in clinical practice income, in the volume of patients treated what they can't earn from individual patient billings.  Economies of scale, to control public costs, in the health care field ignores individual diversity.  People aren't widgets in b-school (business school) or undergraduate economics class lectures regarding what is a sustainable economy. 

Please watch the economics lecture at beginning of the film "Back to School" (starred the late Rodney Dangerfield) for the public policy context of collectively, through democratic self-governance, deciding 'who pays the costs that an individual cannot pay' I refer to above in satirized form.