What we’ve known for years has been newly documented: Americans with disabilities are much more likely to be unemployed and live in poverty, and the U.S. is way behind other developed countries in reducing unemployment and poverty among people with disabilities.

A report released last month by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington based-think tank, states that people with disabilities account for a larger share of those experiencing income poverty than people in all minority or ethnic groups combined and account for a larger share of the income poor than single parents.

It is because so many Americans with disabilities live in poverty that United Spinal Association’s public policy focus includes improving programs that serve this group of citizens.

For example, we advocate for Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to better serve people with disabilities, and we applaud the recent expansion of Medicaid in current health care reform legislation to 133% of the Federal Poverty Level. We also advocate for more affordable accessible housing for people living in poverty.[1] <#_ftn1> Another priority is improved employment services for people with disabilities including work incentives for people receiving Social Security disability benefits and improvements in vocational rehabilitation, transition for students, the Workforce Investment Act and the Rehabilitation Act.

Among this recent report’s key findings:

• Almost half of working-age adults who experience income poverty for at least a12-month
period have one or more disabilities.

• Nearly two-thirds of working-age adults who experience consistent income poverty—more
than 36 months of income poverty during a 48-month period—have one or more
disabilities.

• Male household heads reaching their mid-50s have a 53-percent chance of having been
disabled at least once and a 19-percent chance of having begun a chronic and severe
disability.

• People with disabilities are much more likely to experience various forms of material
hardship—including food insecurity, not getting needed medical or dental care, and not
being able to pay rent, mortgage, and utility bills—than people without disabilities, even after
controlling for income and other characteristics.

• Measures of income poverty that fail to take disability into account likely underestimate the
income people with disabilities need to meet basic needs.

Researchers also point out that jobs that involve providing care to people with disabilities are one of the largest categories of bad jobs in the US, pay very low wages, rarely provide retirement, and often lack health insurance and paid sick leave and vacation.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median wage for nursing aides (including orderlies and attendants) was $11.46 an hour in May 2008 ($23,850 if working full time, year round); for home health aids, it was $9.84 an hour ($20,460 if working full-time, year-round). Further, the Paraprofessional Health Institute reported that the median annual earnings for all direct care workers in 2007 was just $17,000, less than the official poverty threshold that year for a family of three.

So what’s the lesson here? “Any serious state-or national-level agenda to reduce income poverty needs to take disability into account as both a cause and consequence of poverty. A particularly important and immediate implication is the fundamental importance of health care reform, especially the provision of universal coverage, to anti-poverty efforts. Similarly, policies that would guarantee paid sick leave and paid family leave to workers as well as improvements to the Social Security Disability Income (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs should be seen as central to anti-poverty policy,” the report concludes.

To read the full report, please access download the pdf at http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/poverty-disability-2009-09.pdf or visit the Center for Economic and Policy Research at www.cepr.net.

[1] For information about the unaffordability of housing for people with disabilities see Priced Out in 2008, by Emily Cooper, Henry Korman, Ann O’Hara, and Andrew Zovistoski, April 2009, Technical Assistance Collaborative, Inc., Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, Housing Task Force Funded by the Melville Charitable Trust at http://www.tacinc.org/Docs/HH/Priced%20Out%202008.pdf

Tom Scott
Editor
United Spinal Association