Apr 122006
A young Florida man with Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy is going home to die after an extended hospitalization. He was placed on a portable ventilator, but the State of Florida is putting him on a waiting list for home nursing care. Florida’s community-based services program is dramatically underfunded and it’s unlikely he’ll be moved off the waiting list anytime soon, so this young man is going home knowing that he will probably die shortly thereafter.
You would think that a country like ours could establish a uniform standard of services for people with disabilities, regardless of geography. Seven years after Olmstead, people with disabilities in certain regions :cough the South :cough can only choose between institutionalization or near-certain death. I’ll probably get flak from any Southerners reading this, but I remain convinced that Reconstruction is a task that remains unfinished.
Thanks to Nick Dupree for bringing this story to my attention.
i have lived in N.Y. ,Ca. , Mass. ,Ill. ,Tx. , and Florida and the south is the worse.