Disability Thrive Initiative

Christopher Wilson, 30, in the Edgerton home he shares with his parents, Rick and Sue, has worked for more than a decade at Opportunities, Inc. a Fort Atkinson, nonprofit that provides services for the area’s developmentally-disabled.

For decades, facilities where people with disabilities do basic jobs while separated from non-disabled workers were praised for providing those with developmental disabilities opportunities to learn skills and build friendships.
But in recent years, increasing numbers of people, including disability rights advocates and federal officials, have raised concerns that many of these nonprofit training programs, known as “sheltered workshops,” keep disabled workers trapped in low-wage jobs — often making $2 to $3 an hour — and fail to help them move on to higher-paying opportunities in the private or public sectors. Read more.

Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill to codify Community Based Adult Services as a Medi-Cal benefit and continue offering it as a benefit into the future. The state has attempted to eliminate adult day health care in the past. The CBAS program, serving some of the oldest, most frail Californians on Medi-Cal, is the result of a 2011 settlement of a lawsuit challenging the state the last time the state tried to cut the program. The veto Monday of AB1552 by Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) leaves an uncertain future for CBAS. Read more.

At an Assembly Committee on Health hearing yesterday, Department of Health Care Services Director Toby Douglas said the backlog of Medi-Cal applications — at one point in March topping 900,000 unprocessed eligibility claims — now is down to about 250,000 applications and will be “down significantly” from that by the start of November.

Douglas answered a number of concerns at the hearing, including announcing a shift in DHCS policy regarding asthma and allergy testing, as well as Denti-Cal and special-needs dental care issues. Read more.

Beginning Jan. 1, all individual Covered California health plans will include dental coverage for children in the family 18 and younger, a move that state officials hope will result in tens of thousands of kids getting oral health care. While children’s advocates applaud expanding the coverage, they caution that there already aren’t enough pediatric dentists in the state. Read more.

Born five weeks premature, 2-year-old Corbin can’t speak as well as other children his age. But the Modesto toddler is improving all the time because of an infant development specialist provided by California’s Early Start program.
Now more infants and toddlers with developmental delays and those at risk of delays will receive those services because of the state Legislature’s recent move to restore funding of the program to 2009 levels. Read more.

The new benefit includes coverage of the clinical standard of care for autism treatment — Applied Behavior Analysis, also known as ABA therapy. That treatment has shown significant results for a cross-section of children with autism. Of the 5 million children on Medi-Cal in California — that’s roughly half the state’s total children — there are an estimated 75,000 who likely have autism spectrum disorder. Of those children, experts expect about 12,000 children to access the new benefit, based on utilization figures from programs in other states. Read more.

In July President Obama signed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), which will work training programs for individuals with and without disabilities. There are important changes to work training for individuals with disabilities, including: • Each state’s vocational rehabilitation agency (Department of Rehabilitation in California), will spend at least 15% of its budget on pre-employment transition services for individuals getting ready to leave the school system.
• VR agencies can help people to pursue customized employment “based on an individualized determination of the strengths, needs, and interests of the individual.” This provides a lot more flexibility.
• Group supported employment paying less than workers without disabilities receive will be available only on a short-term basis.
• As of July 22, 2016 the use of 14(c) subminimum wage certificates for individuals under the age of 24 will be limited (click the link for the specific legislative language on this).
• Community employment agencies known as “American Job Centers” must make sure that their sites and their programs are accessible for people with disabilities.
The Association for People Supporting Employment First (APSE) wrote a summary of the bill that can be accessed by clicking here. Also, more information and future updates can be found at http://www.doleta.gov/wioa/.