Zoe Brennan-Krohn
speaker
79 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Zoe Brennan-Krohn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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requires non-discrimination in schools, in education, in hospitals, in medical care, in housing, in any entity that gets federal funding, which is a huge swath of entities. They are required to not discriminate and to be inclusive. And so it's you know, a core, the core first disability rights law, civil rights law for folks with disabilities.
And there is a lawsuit now threatening to or attempting to have Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act found unconstitutional in its entirety, which is truly a radical and cruel approach. And I think both of these things, the Medicaid piece, I think, I think it's important to emphasize how extreme these proposals are.
That if you talk about like the size of the cuts to Medicaid that are on the line here, this isn't like trimming around the edges. It's not like, oh, people are going to get 39 hours of care instead of 40 hours of care services or something.
These are radical cuts that are going to kill people, that are going to force people into institutions, that are going to really dramatically reshape how disabled people can live and work and play and live in their communities. Both of those are examples of that threat.
So it makes it, it weakens the protections that they have. And I think it's important to know that we are not starting from the like utopia of disability rights protections, right? It's not like everything's awesome now and then things are going to become bad. Like there's real problems with disability discrimination now.
Now, and there were in the, you know, before Trump took office like this, we have a long way to go. We know that there's, you know, extraordinary stigma and bias against people with disabilities and exclusion in all sorts of And so taking away one of these key tools to protect against that discrimination would be a really big harm.
One of the things that the most recent regulation that came out and that this lawsuit is challenging is about the requirements of hospitals and medical providers. And one of the things it says is that medical providers can't make decisions about medical care or how to allocate resources based on stereotypes about disabled people's quality of life.
And this is something that happens all the time, that medical providers see a disabled patient and they think that person's life can't be worth living. And we saw this, you know, in the early days of COVID, this was very extreme that, you know, when we were There were decisions about who would get ventilators and whether people with intellectual disabilities would be eligible for ventilators.
You hear about it a lot that people, I've heard this story from a few people that they go into, people who use wheelchairs will go into a hospital for pneumonia or something totally treatable but serious and get pressured to sign a DNR. you don't really want to be alive, do you? And that is disability discrimination.
And that is just an extraordinarily powerful thing to imagine happening, you know, to a person and like what that message is that their life can't be worth living. And so what this regulation said, that's a kind of disability discrimination. And I think that is really important to think about like how we understand the breadth of of how disability discrimination can work.
It's not just saying, I hate people in wheelchairs. And there just probably aren't that many people who would say something like that. But you might have someone who says, oh, you're in a wheelchair, your life must be terrible. And maybe they think the second part, but don't say it out loud. Sometimes they do say it out loud.
And there's just so far to go and can't be moving backwards on access to care, access to life in the community and non-discrimination protections.
the point of intersectionality also is important in that disability exists across society, but not equally across society. Disability is disproportionately present in the most marginalized communities, in poor communities, low-income communities, BIPOC communities,
there's less access to care, there's more environmental factors that cause certain kinds of disabilities, there's more like less positive supports and therapeutic interventions. So it's not even just that everyone has multiple identities, but some identities cluster and poverty and marginalized racial identity and disability is one of those, are one of those.
I didn't mean to be correcting you. I was just adding to it.
So that's the case that's trying to challenge, trying to say that Section 504 is legal. unconstitutional and saying that the Rehabilitation Act shouldn't be in place and that people with disabilities shouldn't be entitled to protections under the Rehabilitation Act.
It sure is. Great guess. Yeah.
Educated guess. Texas and 16 fellow states, the attorneys general, are bringing this case and saying that, yeah, that this the entirety of this law that's more than 50 years old, they're now saying, oh, well, we we hadn't thought of this till now. But now we'd like to sue and ask a court to say that this to strike down this 50 plus year old law, which is even if you're not like 50,
You know, sometimes lawyers can do weird stuff that you don't expect. But I'm a lawyer. That's a really weird thing to do as a lawyer, to wait 50 years and then bring a lawsuit like that is not that is not normal. And and because it's a sort of preposterous argument, but it's an argument that they are making, although there has been really incredible community support.
outrage from the disability community around this lawsuit. And there's a ton of overlap between the outrage around Medicaid and the outrage around this lawsuit of folks saying What are you doing? Protect Section 504, protect Medicaid, get out of this space.
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