News and Alerts

Today, amidst rampant spread of COVID-19 infection throughout the country, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced the resolution of a federal complaint filed by CPR and partners against Utah. Today’s resolution sets a national precedent, with OCR building off earlier resolutions of complaints regarding plans in Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee and weighing in on the discriminatory impact of a number of provisions common in many states’ rationing plans. 

Join us today, August 4, for a call-in day to urge the Senate to include funding for home and community-based services (HCBS) in the coronavirus relief bill being negotiated. Even if you’ve called or emailed before, or shared your HCBS story on social media, please contact your Senators again. They need to hear from all of us and they need to hear from us NOW!

The Senate has released a new coronavirus relief package, the HEALS Act, that fails to address the disability community’s most urgent priorities. We need everyone to take action and push your Senators to include our priorities in the relief package that ultimately passes the Senate, so please contact them now!

CPR, together with a coalition of national and state disability and civil rights advocacy groups, has filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights (OCR) challenging the crisis standard of care plans in Arizona and Texas, two states hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a State Medicaid Director letter announcing another delay in the timeline for states to fully implement the Home and Community Based Services (HCBS) Settings Rule, extending the deadline by one year to March 2023. We oppose delaying the March 2022 deadline – still over 20 months away – by another year at this time. The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the risks of large congregate settings and made the Rule’s focus on more individualized supports in smaller and non-disability specific settings more important than ever.

Today, a coalition of nearly 50 advocacy groups and state legislators, led by the Center for Public Representation, The Arc of the United States, The Arc of Virginia, and the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, sent a letter calling on Virginia Governor Northam to right a decade of unjust treatment in a criminal justice system infected with systemic racism and ableism faced by Reginald “Neli” Latson, a young Black man with autism and intellectual disability.  The letter demands that Governor Northam grant Mr. Latson a full pardon, commit to continue funding his disability services in Florida where he and his family now reside, and issue a public apology to Mr. Latson and his family.

Today, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced the resolution of a federal complaint filed against Tennessee, one of nearly a dozen complaints filed by CPR, together with a coalition of national disability advocates, challenging states’ plans for rationing medical care during the COVID-19 pandemic as discriminating against people with disabilities.

CPR’s seminal analysis of informed choice for institutionalized persons with disabilities has just been published in Volume 40, No.1 of the Journal on Law and Medicine (2020). The article - Realizing the Promise of Olmstead: Ensuring the Informed Choice of Institutionalized Persons with Disabilities to Receive Services in the Most Integrated Setting – traces the history of the issue of choice under the Supreme Court’s decision in Olmstead v. L.C., and proposes a legal analytical framework for ensuring that persons with disabilities can make an informed choice about whether to live and work in an integrated setting rather than remain in a segregated institution.

Today, CPR and partners filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) over Nebraska’s ongoing failure to provide access for Nebraskans with disabilities to TestNebraska. The State’s COVID-19 testing program currently requires the ability to access and use the internet and then the ability to drive to a testing site.

The Connecticut Legal Rights Project, Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law and Center for Public Representation this week filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in a class action case challenging Connecticut’s failure to take adequate steps to protect residents of two state psychiatric hospitals from contracting and dying from COVID-19.