Prior to July 26, 1990, individuals with disabilities routinely faced discrimination, overt hostility, and explicit ableism without any protections or avenues for recourse. The harm was immense; community members were turned away from jobs, denied promotions, removed from stores, refused basic accommodations, and regularly battled public spaces designed without regard for anyone other than fully nondisabled people.
Disability Pride Month’s July origins can be attributed to the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26, 1990. The ADA’s passage came after decades of fierce disability advocacy and incremental wins. The law expressly outlawed discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, creating a strong legal deterrent against systems that harmed and held back disabled people for centuries. The legacy is hard to overstate – the ADA empowered millions of disabled individuals, including older adults, with enforceable rights and the changes needed for many to become fully participating members of their community.
In 1990, approximately 17.1 million adults aged 65+ were considered to have a disability. Today, nearly 44% of Americans aged 65+ report a disability, revealing that older adults were a significant portion of the disabled population in 1990, and that remains the case today. The ADA provides vital protections from discrimination and harm, and also provides essential supports to diverse older adults.
The convergence of Disability Pride Month with the 35th anniversary of the ADA’s signing provides a poignant opportunity to mark the legislation’s significance, challenges of implementation, and unique threats posed to the disability community by the recent budget reconciliation passed in Congress.
An important place to start is recognizing that the promise of the ADA has never been completely fulfilled. Many public locations, including critical ones like schools, are not frequently checked to ensure compliance with ADA requirements. This means community members will spend years dealing with broken or missing accommodations before they are resolved. The onus is frequently on individuals with disabilities to file suits to bring attention to a violation. For many older adults, failure to truly fulfill the promises of the ADA often results in neglect.
For example, in many neighborhoods with large older disabled populations, there is often a lack of ADA-accessible seating in public transportation. A 2018 NYC report found that nearly 640,000 residents—including older adults, people with disabilities, and young children—live in neighborhoods without a single accessible subway station. Only 24% of subway stations are accessible, making New York City the city with the least accessible metropolitan rail system in the United States.
If the nation’s most populous city is also one of the least accessible, it raises alarming questions about the prioritization of the ADA. On a broader scale, even though disabled people are almost 14% of the total US population, nondisabled people still have comparatively little awareness regarding disability culture, history, or even the ADA. This remains true even though nondisabled people have benefited from the ADA themselves through curb cuts, ramps, closed captioning, elevators, and more. To this day, people with disabilities still have the lowest employment and highest poverty rates of any minority group. A lot of work is still needed to ensure people with disabilities can obtain full and equal participation in public life.
There are new challenges as well. The recently enacted budget reconciliation bill, HR 1, contains devastating cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. This bill will lead to nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts, a vital program for disabled people. It will also cause a crisis in our healthcare system, which is already overwhelmed and has been under greater strain since COVID-19 began. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicts that about 12 million people, many with disabilities, will lose their health insurance. Hospitals and clinics, especially those in rural areas, will either reduce services or close completely. Disabled individuals and older adults will be most affected by these consequences.
Research shows that when federal Medicaid funding dries up, states tend to first eliminate optional benefits like home and community-based services (HCBS) first. This includes personal daily support, home-delivered meals, transportation services, and many more. This will cause immense damage to the disabled and the older adult communities who rely on these services to live independently, avoid institutional care, and prevent family caregivers from burning out. Furthermore, Medicaid and SNAP recipients will now have work requirements until they reach the age of 64 – placing additional burdens on the disability and older adult populations and making it harder to receive essential benefits.
In this particularly fraught time, it’s useful to think back to the original promise of the ADA and the vision fought for by generations of disability advocates. The late Judy Heumann, an icon in the disability rights movement, once said, “Part of the problem is that we tend to think that equality is about treating everyone the same, when it’s not. It’s about fairness. It’s about equity of access.” AAPD and the DEC are committed to continuing to fight for that vision, one in which disabled individuals and older adults receive the care they need and are fully enabled to lead the lives they want to live.