April 3, 2024
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Moyle v. United States on Wednesday. The Court will decide whether hospitals must provide pregnant people with emergency abortion care.
March 15, 2024
DREDF, CommunicationFIRST, and the Independent Living Resource Center San Francisco sent a letter to UCSF leaders regarding Alice Wong's recent experience at the Moffitt/Long Hospital for an urgent medical need. During her stay, Alice was denied effective communication and was subjected to the constant risk of infection from unmasked or improperly masked staff.
March 12, 2024
DREDF carried out the Mobility Device User Survey (MDUS) online in Spring 2023 to understand the on-the-ground experiences of Medicare beneficiaries when they attempted to obtain mobility equipment.
March 11, 2024
We want to hear from individuals who have or have had wheelchair-related coverage turned down by Medicare, even after a qualified provider prescribed the wheelchair.
January 10, 2024
People with disabilities cannot be fully included in healthcare equity and equality work without being recognized and counted demographically.
September 8, 2023
The new provisions show HHS’s commitment to reconciling Section 504, the ADA, and key cases that together enable people with various disabilities to achieve consistent and timely access to needed healthcare, so that they can pursue their own life goals and interests. DREDF shares this commitment.
March 28, 2023
The consequences of people with disabilities not being counted among those who are capable of good health results in a self-fulfilling prophecy that ensures disabled people can rarely achieve good health.
July 14, 2022
In April, Laguna Honda Hospital (LHH) was decertified by the federal government because of a finding that LHH violated quality of care standards. This means that LHH will stop receiving Medi-Cal and Medicare payments after September 13, 2022. LHH also had to create a closure plan to show the federal government how it would transfer and relocate all of its patients and residents. Our colleagues at Disability Rights California have created a fact sheet for LHH residents to explain their rights during the closure process.
March 7, 2022
DREDF, in collaboration with the Community Living Policy Center at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University submitted comments to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on proposed changes to regulation of Dual-Eligible Special Needs Plans (D-SNPs) as part of a larger rulemaking on Medicare Part C & D. We support the direction of CMS’s proposals and appreciate the efforts to tighten and clarify requirements and the focus on enrollee experience and needs. Our comments primarily explore areas where we believe that CMS could include further specificity in the regulations such as advisory committees, network adequacy, durable medical equipment, and home health care. These regulations are important given the rapid growth of D-SNPs across the country. [...]
January 27, 2022
DREDF and our colleagues at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law commented on all these aspects of the proposed rule. Non-discriminatory benefit design in healthcare is especially important for people with disabilities, including those with mental health disabilities, who have experienced both obvious and subtle discrimination in insurance for decades such as visit limits, "special" co-pays, and outright failure to cover services and items that are medically necessary for mostly people with disabilities. In our comments, we recommend that plan spending on improving health equity for people with disabilities, such as by helping providers to get accessible examination equipment, could and should be considered a quality improvement that doesn't count toward an insurer's profits. We also pointed out how telehealth has been inaccessible for people who are Deaf or who have other communications disabilities. Finally, we pushed for better demographic data collection on disability in healthcare overall. [...}