Air travel for people with disabilities continues to be a pain in the ass. Carrie Salberg, a Minnesota woman with muscular dystrophy who uses a ventilator, was kicked off a flight for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. The pilot claimed that her vent wasn’t approved for in-flight use, but then she was placed on another flight that required her to catch a connecting flight home. Delta Airlines refunded Salberg’s tickets and those of her companions, but only after the local paper started asking questions.

Nothing like this has ever happened to me. I always expect complications when I fly, but airline staff haven’t questioned my equipment. Instead, they simply proceed to misplace it. I long for the day when airplanes are truly accessible and people like Salberg and me can easily board without being treated like suspicious cargo. Unfortunately, the narrow profit margins of airlines make it unlikely that flying will become any more disability-friendly in the near future.

The Kepler space telescope continues to provide evidence that the universe could be teeming with planets that may not be so different from Earth. According to the latest data released from NASA, Kepler has found as many as 1,235 candidates that could be planets orbiting stars and 54 of them appear to be orbiting in the habitable zone that would allow for the presence of water and possibly life. That’s a small percentage, but Kepler has not even completed its survey of a small portion of the sky. If we extrapolate those results to the rest of the unsurveyed sky, there could be thousands of Earth-like planets out there in the depths of space. We’ll probably never get to actually see any of them, but it’s comforting to know that our blue world may not be the only one that drew the lottery card for life.

Another conservative judge ruled today that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. All of it. The mandate. The exchanges. The expansion of Medicaid. The protections for people with pre-existing conditions. The whole shebang. The judge’s order doesn’t explicitly stay the law, which means that implementation will will continue as this case and others like it wind their way up to Justice Kenn–er, the Supreme Court. As Politico points out, several states that are parties to the litigation against the ACA are busy implementing the law and requesting federal grants to assist their implementation efforts. As I’ve said before, these implementation efforts are likely to be near completion in most states by the time the high court decides on the merits of the challenges against the law. I have a hard time imagining the Court nullifying the law and leaving the policy landscape in chaos, but smarter people than me have tried to second-guess the Court and made to look like fools.

A group of Minnesota health plans and hospitals has unveiled a proposal to trim Medicaid costs through service cuts and tax hikes. They recommend scaling back certain optional services that Minnesota currently offers under its Medicaid program, such as dental care. Waivered services for the elderly and people with disabilities would also be reduced (waivers pay for things like home modifications and attendant care). The proposal suggests that people with disabilities should be moved into managed care as a further cost-saving measure. “Sin taxes” on alcohol and tobacco would generate additional revenue.
The health plans already serve tens of thousands of Medicaid enrollees, so their ideas will carry substantial weight at the Legislature. But there are a lot of bitter pills in this proposal. Republicans are bound to reject anything resembling a tax increase and disability advocates will vehemently oppose any effort to move people with disabilities into managed care. Already, health plans are being accused of plotting ways to add more publicly funded customers to their rolls. I don’t like most of the ideas contained in the proposal, but the document does serve an important function. It articulates the severity of the cuts that will be necessary to reduce health care spending, even with some additional revenue tools. Perhaps it will prompt our elected leaders to start a frank and specific debate on our health care priorities.

I’m preparing to watch the State of the Union speech, although I probably won’t remember most of it a month from now. These speeches rarely change the national political narrative and most of the policy proposals set forth tonight will never amount to anything. It’s mostly spectacle and ritual and not nearly as interesting as any given day in the British Parliament. Nobody will interrupt Obama to ask a question and Democrats won’t jeer the House Republican majority. It will all be very stiff and civil and ultimately forgettable. But I’ll still watch; I’m curious to see whether Michelle Bachmann and Keith Ellison will sit next to each while exchanging awkward glances throughout the whole speech.