From CTV.CA, London [Ontario] Free Press:

TORONTO — The father of an autistic teenager who has camped out at the Ontario legislature for more than a week is vowing not to eat until the province agrees to eliminate the backlog of children waiting for a crucial but costly therapy.

Stefan Marinoiu, 49, who has been drinking nothing but water for eight days, is trying to put pressure on the province to deliver the treatment more quickly to autistic kids, including his 15-year-old son Simon.

Marinoiu’s goal is to eliminate by November the wait list of 1,148 eligible children who are still waiting to receive intensive behavioral intervention therapy, or IBI.

Advocates angry at budget cuts, 16,000-person waiting list for services

From the Miami Herald:

Caught in a pincer between angry lawmakers and even angrier advocates, Jane Johnson, the head of one of the state’s most troubled departments, the Agency for Persons with Disabilities, resigned Friday as the legislative session neared an end.

… About 31,000 Floridians — mostly people with mental retardation, autism and cerebral palsy — receive services from APD, and another 16,000 remain on a waiting list that gets longer every year. With a shrinking budget and growing costs, administrators have been forced to ration services, a policy that has drawn the ire of families and advocates.

… Johnson has acknowledged that much of her job entailed taking blows from angry parents, advocates and service providers. ”When I took the job,” she told The Miami Herald Friday, “I got more condolences than congratulations.

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8,000 people with developmental disabilities are waiting for housing

From the Newark Star-Ledger:

A legal advocacy group and a prominent law firm yesterday sued the New Jersey Department of Human Services, saying 8,000 developmentally disabled people have had their rights violated because they have been waiting — some for a decade — to move into government-sponsored community housing.

The federal lawsuit alleges the state is failing to meet its legal responsibility to provide housing for people who want or need to live outside of their family homes. The department has established a waiting list, but few ever leave it unless a parent or other caretaker becomes ill or dies, the lawsuit said.

“These individuals have been for years diverted to a so-called ‘wait-list’ for such services, with no guarantee, and little hope, of accessing the services they need,” said R. Scott Thompson of Lowenstein Sandler, which is representing the federally funded legal rights group, New Jersey Protection and Advocacy Inc., for free.

Waiting for help that’s not coming

‘Judge a society by how it treats its weakest?’

From the Annapolis Capital, an extended feature on people with disabilities in Maryland who qualify for services that would allow them to live more independently, but cannot receive them because the services have not been funded.

Four years ago, there were 9,697 people waiting for help. There are 17,250 today. Ninety-four percent of those on the list need help immediately, said Michelle Hart, co-director of public policy initiatives for the Maryland Developmental Disabilities Council. She estimates it would take hundreds of millions of dollars to solve the problem.

“It is at a crisis stage,” said Robert T. Ireland, executive director of a group that serves about 450 people with developmental disabilities. “I turn people away every day. It’s the saddest part of my day.”

See related posts here and here and here.

From the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot:

In Virginia, the list of people with disabilities waiting for services is growing faster than the services available.

Brandon Christie of Virginia Beach needs round-the-clock care. He is one of 270 people in his community who are on a waiting list for 27 available Medicaid-funded slots, with at least 99 people ahead of him. Statewide, 4,000 people are waiting for services.

The Virginia General Assembly this session provided funding for an additional 600 people with intellectual disabilities like Christie to live more independently in the community, but the list is not keeping pace with the growing need. Without new slots, people on the list must wait until someone with a Medicaid waiver no longer needs it because he or she has moved out of state or into an institution or has died.

Christie, 24, lives with his parents. If they became too old or sick to care for him, he could move up on the list.

Writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dave Blanchard takes Governor Sonny Perdue to task for a budget plan that withdraws his previous pledge to whittle away the waiting lists separating people with disabilities from much-needed services. There are currently more than 5,500 Georgians with disabilities waiting for services, and the list is growing.

Gov. Sonny Perdue … dropped one of the main tenets of government, to support people in our community who are among our most vulnerable.

… If you could hear the stories being told by parents, you would know that fear and frustration for the future are at the core of their worries. Their needs are not tied to revenue projections. Parents at their wits’ end do not profess to understand the complicated formulas used to define budget revenues, or the Solomonlike decisions of prioritizing a $21.1 billion state budget. They simply tell us their honest stories of overwhelming need, and are left to pray that their trust in our state legislators is well-founded. I, too, pray for our governor and General Assembly to have the courage and resolve to honor commitments made to 5,500 Georgians waiting for our help.

Dave Blanchard is director of public policy for the Atlanta Alliance on Developmental Disabilities.

Writing in the Newport News [Virginia] Daily Press, Greta Harrison says Virginia must fund Medicaid waivers to assure that people with disabilities can live and work in their communities. Presently, the waiting list in Virginia has more than 4,000 people on it, with more than 2,000 of them in urgent need. Without full funding for the waivers, she says, thousands of people with disabilities will have no choice but to go into institutions. An excerpt:

Virginia is the only state still investing capital in rebuilding and expanding institutions, or “training centers.” The average cost for a person in an institution is $150,000 a year. The average cost for a waiver is $56,000. Virginia spends millions of dollars in “training centers” and invests zero dollars in community housing for those with intellectual disabilities. If institutions were a good and viable option for the majority of people with disabilities, 49 other states would not have made the decisions they have to move away from institutions.

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