From the Dallas Morning News, a comprehensive story on the difficulties facing Texas families who are seeking to care for disabled family members at home — not in institutions. They face waiting lists for services of up to 13 years.

Nearly 100,000 people with disabilities are stuck in Texas queues for home and independent living services, the court-mandated community alternatives to state institutions for the mentally retarded.

While legislators have taken note, directing more dollars in recent sessions to move people off of so-called interest lists and into home and community-based care, their efforts have hardly kept up with population growth.

… advocates for the disabled say as long as lawmakers continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars a year into state institutions, several of which have endured high-profile cases of abuse and neglect, they’ll be unable to afford in-home care for tens of thousands of struggling families.

Ten states and the District of Columbia no longer have institutions. Most others have scaled them back dramatically. But a few remaining outposts, Texas included, still rely heavily on institutions while trying to accommodate people in the community, a budget challenge that almost always leads to a waiting list.

… State leaders argue the two [institutions and the waiting list] aren’t linked – the solution, they say, is simply finding another funding source. And they say closing Texas’ 13 state institutions for the mentally retarded is politically unpalatable. Those facilities, which generally don’t have waiting lists for entry, are still the best option for many Texans with profound disabilities, they say.

Two families are profiled, and video interviews are provided on the newspaper’s website. One of the families has been on the state’s waiting list for almost a decade.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 1:32 pm and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, autism, institutionalization, politics, waiting list. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post