Health care disparities for disabled
Two decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act went into effect, people with disabilities continue to face difficulties meeting major social needs, including obtaining appropriate access to health care facilities and services. In an article in the October issue of Health Affairs, Lisa Iezzoni, director of the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard professor of medicine, analyzes available information on disparities affecting people with disabilities and highlights barriers that continue to restrict their access to health services. “A lot of attention has been paid to how health disparities affect people in racial and ethnic minority groups, and this report details how people with disabilities are also disadvantaged,” she says. “Most of the literature about these problems has appeared in disability-centered journals that are not very accessible to many people, so one of my goals in putting together this analysis was bringing this information to a high-visibility, broadly...