Throughout July, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Office of Minority Health (CMS OMH) celebrates Disability Pride Month and the anniversary of the Americans with Disability Act (ADA). Enacted on July 26, 1990, the ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in employment, transportation, public accommodations, telecommunications, communications, and access to state and local government programs and services. During this observance CMS OMH highlights the unique health care challenges and barriers faced by those living with a disability.
61 million adults in the United States have some type of disability, with the most prominent disabilities being mobility (serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs) and cognition (serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions). Individuals living with disabilities face poorer overall health outcomes, including increased likelihood of obesity (41.6%), diabetes (15.9%), and depression (43%)
Additionally, individuals living with disabilities face barriers to care, with 1 in 4 adults with disabilities not having access to a usual health care provider and 1 in 5 adults with disabilities not having access to a routine check-up in the past year. This puts those individuals living with disabilities at increased risk for poor health outcomes.
During Disability Pride Month, CMS OMH is highlighting how you can help address these barriers and disparities impacting individuals living with disabilities. The anniversary of the ADA offers us an opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to ensuring people with disabilities have access to quality health care services and share resources providers can use to help empower individuals living with disabilities.
Resources:
- Visit CMS OMH’s Improving Access to Care for People with Disabilities webpage to find tools and resources that can help you improve services and help patients understand their rights. This webpage is also available in Spanish.
- Download CMS OMH’s Getting the Care You Need: Guide for People with Disabilities, now available in eight languages and in Braille.
- Review the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Disparities in Medicare Fee-For-Service Beneficiaries data snapshot to learn more about racial and geographic ASD disparities among those enrolled in Medicare fee-for-service.
- Download the How to Improve Physical Accessibility at Your Health Care Facility resource, which helps health care providers, staff, and administrators in a variety of outpatient settings improve the accessibility of their health care facility.
- Review the How Does Disability Affect Access to Health Care for Non-Dual Eligible Beneficiaries? data highlight, which examines access and utilization among adults with Medicaid who are not dually eligible for Medicare and who reported difficulty accessing needed health care.
- Take the Modernizing Health Care to Improve Physical Accessibility training to learn about solutions for increasing the physical accessibility of health care settings and services for individuals with disabilities.
- Visit ADA.gov to learn more about the rights available to individuals with disabilities under the ADA.