5/21/25 - Medicaid, working from home, and air travel

Hello!

How is your week going so far? Here are your three disability-related links for today ...

Here’s How to Fight Back Against the GOP Proposal to Gut Medicaid

Matthew Cortland, Data For Progress - May 16, 2025

"- Remind people that the home care they may need is likely Medicaid.

- Remind people that the state health care program they really like is Medicaid.

- Call 'work requirements' what they really are: a 'job loss penalty.'

- Emphasize the widespread impacts of Medicaid cuts, particularly on seniors and disabled people."

Here's another article on fighting against proposed Medicaid cuts. It was highlighted by a Bluesky comment from Data For Progress, which was responding to yesterday's newsletter, and urging us not to talk about "work requirements," but rather call them 'job loss penalties." That makes sense to me. And there's a lot more good advice in this article on how to battle Medicaid cuts with the best available data and most persuasive arguments.

Working from home boosted growth by expanding disability employment

Nicholas Bloom, Gordon Dahl, Dan-Olof Rooth, Vox.eu - May 10, 2025

"Using the Current Population Survey, we estimate that about 75% of the increase in full-time employment among people with physical disabilities post-Covid can be explained by the increase in WFH. This is a rise in employment of approximately a quarter of million people across the US by 2024 alone."

The fact that increased opportunities to work from home is a "silver lining" for disability employment from the pandemic has seemed intuitively true since the pandemic began. This piece offers some more definitive data to document it. What the article doesn't address is the recent push by employers, states, and the federal government to reduce working from home – even to stigmatize it as something damaging and contemptible. Will working from home continue to provide a more accessible and widening path to employment for disabled people? Or, will those new opportunities be taken away?

How to Make Air Travel More Accessible: A Conversation with Kelly Buckland

Seth McBride, New Mobility - May 6, 2025

"Everybody else presumes that they’re safe when they fly, except for us. People are getting significant injuries just trying to fly. And in fact, I think some people have had life threatening injuries as a result of flying ... If that was happening to a nondisabled person, we’d be having NTSB investigations and reports on how to never have this happen again, but I think it’s because we’re already kind of considered damaged goods that they don’t take it as seriously when we get hurt."

This interview shows what kind of progress we can make in disability rights. It requires a receptive government, and the leadership of capable people with disabilities who have a strong, first-hand understanding of what disabled people need and want.

Tell Congress: No Cuts to Medicaid

EveryAction

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