A piece of the pie? No thank you. We need another pie. Feb 11. 2010 | Comments (0)
Because of a fiscal shortfall, The NJ Division of Disability
is moving to disqualify roughly 60% of its TBI Fund recipients: individuals with stroke, many
with aphasia, who have benefitted from it
over the past 5 years. The TBI Fund draws money from the Division of
Motor Vehicles, where $ .50 of every person who renews auto
registration is delegated to the service of people with acquired brain
injury. As a funder of last resort, it has permitted almost 3,000
people to receive physical, occupational, and speech therapy when third
party payors withdraw support. (In the interest of full disclosure,
some of Speaking of Aphasia's clients are funded by this organization)
Now, underfunded and beleaguered, the Fund is hurting. How
discriminatory for the Division to reverse its original definition of
TBI, which included stroke and aphasia, at the point when simply
increasing the DMV allocation by just $ .50 would essentially solve the
problem.
What is most upsetting to me, however, is the perpetuation of a long
held divisive disability strategy by those in power: create a situation that may pit
those with one disability, against those with another. This tactic has
been used historically to defeat the efforts of coalitions of people
with disabilities when they have had the foresight to see that we do
not need to fight over getting a piece of the pie. We need another pie.
As SLP's, we must be very careful not to let efforts like these - some
of which my accompany the changes forthcoming in health care policy -
to press us in ways which point out the differences among consumers,
rather than the similarities.
Consumers and providers in our state will mount a campaign to fight
these proposed changes. In the process, you may be sure, we will not
allow ourselves to battle people with TBI, but instead, those who
control the allocations. Let us be clear about who our target is, and do all we can to change the course of this decision.