Watch Out! Amendments To ADA Pass House

From Dow Jones:

The U.S. House moved Wednesday to broaden the definition of a disability under federal laws, passing a bill that would effectively reverse recent Supreme Court decisions on the workplace rights of disabled employees.

The bill, which passed 402-17, would revise the term "disability" to encompass a broader range of physical and mental impairments. Disability rights advocates say 1999 and 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decisions have so curtailed the scope of disabilities protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, as to exclude conditions such as cancer and cerebral palsy.

The bill would state that a disability couldn't be determined by whether " mitigating measures," including medication, prosthetics and assistive technologies, are available. The bill excludes people whose condition is expected to last six months or less.

According to the House Education and Labor Committee, plaintiffs in 2004 lost 97% of ADA employment discrimination claims, "often due to the interpretation of definition of disability."

So why does this matter to those interested in the work of the Social Security Administration? The argument has been made in the past that the ADA dramatically opened the doors for the disabled to return to work and that, therefore, it should be made harder to get on Social Security disability benefits and, if one gets on them, to stay on them. This has not happened so far largely because the ADA has been made a dead letter by the Supreme Court. If the ADA gets some teeth, this argument is likely to come back.

The argument that the ADA should change everything about the Social Security disability programs looks absurd at ground level. By statute, employer attitudes are excluded as a factor in determining disability at Social Security. The vast majority of disability claimants suffer from conditions that could not possibly be accommodated by employers. But the idea that simply passing amendments to the ADA could take lots of people off disability benefits and put them into jobs has such a powerful appeal to the naive that this is likely to have some effect upon the Social Security disability programs.

The irony is that those who promote an idea which would cause dramatic damage to the disabled population of this country are often those whom society thinks of as prototypically disabled, people in wheelchairs. Most people who are in wheelchairs do not suffer from progressive illness or severe pain or severe mental illness and have little sympathy for those who do. They believe that if they can conquer their disability that there is no reason why others cannot. If they could get over the depression that accompanied the own adjustment to wheelchair life, there is no reason why some person suffering from bipolar disorder or schizophrenia cannot get over their mental illness. My impression is that people in wheelchairs often dramatically overgeneralize from their own situations. Instead of helping others with disabilities, they are often the enemy of others who are disabled.