In my latest reading of Saving Lives & Saving Money: Transforming Health and Healthcare, Newt Gingrich talks about the living arrangements of people with disabilities. On page 198, he states:
"...most
families want to do as much as humanly and financially possible to
enable their family members with a disability to live in their own home
and participate in the community. And, from the perspective of public
policy, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for our
country to continue providing costly institutional care for people with
disabilities as the number of people needing these services grows."
On
pages 198-199, Newt quotes Carol Hughes-Novak, who was the chairperson
of the Disabilities Task Force in Newt's district and whose son has
cerebral palsy. Carol believes in promoting "implementation of
President Bush's Olmstead Executive Order that requires state Medicaid
programs to provide long-term-care services in the community whenever
appropriate for the individual." (See here
for information about the Olmstead Executive Order.) Carol supports
reversing the bias in Medicaid towards institutional care, as disabled
people under Medicaid are entitled to placement in an institution, while
those who prefer "Medicaid Home and Community based long-term care
services that are more humane and almost always less costly" must wait
for years.
This discussion stood out to me because of posts that I read on the blog, Whose Planet Is It Anyway,
during the 2008 Presidential election. According to those posts, John
McCain supported institutional care for the disabled rather than
integrating the disabled into their communities because he thought that
the latter was too expensive, when (as the blog, Newt, and Carol point
out) it is actually institutional care that is more expensive. Those
posts made me question that Republicans were truly on the side of fiscal
responsibility. It turns out, though, that people in both parties
think that we should move away from institutional care and towards
helping the disabled to integrate into their communities. See here and here.