BRIEFING HIGHLIGHTS BENEFITS OF REHAB AND HABILITATION
On Tuesday, AAHD was pleased to co-sponsor a bi-partisan congressional briefing on “The Value of Rehabilitation and Habilitation Services and Devices”. This briefing highlighted the impact of rehabilitation and habilitation services and therapies and the impact of prosthetics, orthotics, durable medical equipment, and other assistive devices. To learn more about the briefing or for links to video highlights of the briefing, check out our news item. For more information on rehabilitation and habilitation, check out our NDNRC fact sheet “Rehabilitation and Habilitation Services and Devices.”
In case you missed it, last week we posted an analysis of the new Senate bill which would repeal the ACA, known as the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017 (BCRA). The blog post is entitled “What the Senate Version of the ACA Repeal Would Mean for People with Disabilities.” Previously, we had blogged about how the House’s American Health Care Act (AHCA) would affect people with disabilities (once in March when the AHCA was originally introduced and once in May on the final version of the AHCA passed by the House).
Here are some other tools which breakdown what the BCRA would mean:
- Kaiser Family Foundation: Interactive Map of Premiums and Tax Credits under the ACA v. BCRA
- Kaiser Family Foundation: Issue Brief “Premiums under the Senate Better Care Reconciliation Act”
- National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP): State-by-State Comparison of Premiums Under ACA and BCRA
- NASHP: Comparison Chart – ACA v. AHCA v. BCRA
- National Health Law Program: Blog post “BCRA’s Three Strikes for Medicaid”
In addition, the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, a national disability coalition of which AAHD is a member, released a statement on the Congressional Budget Office’s score of the BCRA.
As stated in our blog posts referenced above, AAHD opposes both the AHCA and the BCRA. If you’re interested in our advocacy efforts around the ACA repeal, then check out our last Action Alert. You can also view our NDNRC statement on health reform which we released after the elections last November. In the statement entitled “Preserve the Protections Provided by the Affordable Care Act,” we call on Congress and the Administration to protect provisions in the ACA which have benefited people with disabilities. The full statement can be found on our website, where it is also available in a PDF download, by clicking here.
The CDC funded New Hampshire Disability and Public Health Project has two double-sided data briefs concerning the health and wellness of people with intellectual and/or mobility disabilities which were created earlier this grant year. The first relates to Health Communication Needs, and the second discusses Diabetes Prevention.
The University of Washington Healthy Aging Rehabilitation Research Training Center (RRTC) has released a plain language summary entitled “Falling Occurs All Too Often for People Aging with Muscular Dystrophy, Multiple Sclerosis, Post-Polio Syndrome and Spinal Cord Injury.” To read the summary, click here. To read their related fact sheet entitled “How to Prevent Falls,” click here.
Last week, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released the Eligibility Determinations and Enrollment Report from April 2017. To read the report from CMS, click here. This report can also be found on our Resources & Links page under “Enrollment Statistics.” Prior Medicaid enrollment reports from CMS, are archived on our website here.
Are you looking for local partners to help with outreach to the disability community? The NDNRC has Community Outreach Collaboratives (COCs) which work to increase collaborations in the community, dissemination and outreach efforts and enrollment of people with disabilities in the ACA marketplace. To find a COC, click here.
To access the archives for our weekly updates click here.