Editorials

Going to work may become less onerous for disabled people if the state legislature backs AB925, a bill introduced by Assemblymember Dion Aroner, D-Berkeley. It was heard in the Assembly Health Committee Tuesday. 

Most folks, when they go to work, try to get their employers to pay them as much as they can. No so for the disabled.  

If they earn too much, their Medi-Cal and attendant care benefits get cut off. 

The bill “ensures that people can go to work and not lose their income and services,” Aroner said, noting that 70 percent of disabled people are unemployed. For disabled people of color, the figure goes up to more than 90 percent, she said. 

Pam Dahl, a disabled woman from Oakland, works and earns about $20,000 a year. That’s  

little enough to allow Dahl to keep her medical benefits and home health care attendant.  

The problem, as Dahl describes it, is that she’d like to get married. But under present law, her income would be added to her husband’s, and she would lose Medi-Cal and attendant benefits. 

“His income would put us over the top,” Dahl said in a telephone interview from Sacramento Monday, where she had just discussed the bill in a capitol press conference.  

Under Aroner’s bill, an individual can earn up to 450 percent of poverty rate without having benefits cut off. Currently, a disabled person can earn only up to 250 percent of the poverty rate.  

And the income of an individual’s spouse would not be added to the recipient’s income to determine eligibility, as it is today. 

AB925 also provides for one-stop centers to help disabled people get into the work force and it sets up a board that will include the disabled to oversee the effectiveness of the centers. 

“(The Employment Development Department) is not a good service provider to people with disabilities,” Dahl said.  

Dahl’s not only thinking about getting married. She’s thinking far ahead to retirement. Under current law, she’s permitted to put aside only $2,000, but under Aroner’s bill, she could save $80,000.  

“It’s not that much,” she said.