Posted: June 20, 2024
Olmstead v. L.C. and E.W. is an articulation by our nation’s highest court of disabled people’s right to community integration, free from the stereotypical assumption that people with disabilities need to be isolated and institutionalized for their and everyone else’s safety and comfort. On June 22nd, the disability community will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Olmstead decision.
We have many reasons to be glad. First, we celebrate how the decision enabled Lois Curtis and Elaine Wilson, the disabled plaintiffs in Olmstead who had been inappropriately institutionalized since they were teenagers, to return to and build community, discovering and using their human potential and living independently for the rest of their lives. We also recognize how the decision became a key precedent that fueled important impact litigation all over the country, including from the federal Department of Justice, leading to institutional closures and ‘springing’ people with disabilities of all ages to return to their communities with critical long-term services and supports. And last but not least, we honor the hard work of advocates and people with disabilities who have wrought systemic change state by state and at the federal level, achieving significant rebalancing of Medicaid dollars from institutional placements to increased home and community-based services.
Clearly Olmstead‘s legacy is not only symbolic, but it is equally important to recognize that the disability community sees the decision as an enduring promise. Olmstead is a promise that people with disabilities cannot, for the sake of convenience or saving state money, be warehoused away out of sight and mind. This promise applies to community-based supports such as personal assistance, long-term and acute healthcare services, housing, employment, and reentry services, all social determinants of health, that people with disabilities must be able to access in order to sustainably live outside of institutions. The promise includes ensuring that people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, low-income people, wheelchairs users, people with mental health disabilities, and autistic and other neurodiverse people have the supports and insurance coverage they need to stay well and be truly integrated within society at large.
Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund celebrates Olmstead for what has been accomplished in the 25 years since the ruling, and for the promise it spoke into being: that we will together finally reach a point where people with all kinds of disabilities and people without disabilities can equally count on a healthcare system that assumes patients will return to homes in the communities where they live, work, and play.
Olmstead is a promise because, as much as it has spurred, it has not been fulfilled. We will continue.