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Disability Goes Partisan Whatever your political leanings, the recent Republican and Democratic National Conventions had a wheelchair user for you. At the virtual Democratic convention, high-profile advocate Ady Barkan, who has ALS, issued a passionate call for politicians to start treating healthcare as a human right. “In the midst of a pandemic, nearly 100 million Americans do not have sufficient health insurance,” said Barkan, who speaks using a communication device. “And even good insurance does not cover essential needs like long-term care. Our loved ones are dying in unsafe nursing homes, our nurses are overwhelmed and unprotected, and our essential workers are treated as dispensable.”
Andrea Dalzell
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Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Warren
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In September, the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation announced Reveca Torres, Andrea Dalzell and Dr. Brian Elizabeth Warren and Ady Barkan discuss Kwon as the winners of its healthcare. inaugural Visionary Prize, with a jaw-dropping award of $1 million each. Torres, the 2016 New Mobility Person of the Year, is the founder of Backbones, a nonprofit that connects and serves the spinal cord injury community, as well as a board member of United Spinal Association. Dalzell, also a United Spinal member, is a wheelchair-using nurse who has worked the frontlines during the COVID-19 crisis and an advocate for more inclusion in the medical field. A few days later, at the Republican convention, the messaging was Kwon is a spinal cord injury researcher. decidedly more upbeat. Madison Cawthorn, 25, who uses a wheelchair due Dalzell discovered she was a prize winner to paraplegia and has a real chance to become the youngest member on Good Morning America. When asked of the House of Representatives, presented a lofty message about what she would do with her prize, the power of young people to change history, while casting she immediately responded, “I conservatives as America’s change makers. At the end of the want to start a whole program speech, Cawthorn stood up out of his wheelchair with the for people with disabilities help of leg braces and a walker. “You can kneel before God, to get into health care. They but stand for our flag,” he said. should be given a chance.” How you view Barkan’s healthcare assessment and Torres plans to use the money to Cawthorn’s theatrical use of his disability may be something expand Backbones programs and serof a Rorschach test for your political leanings. The New York vices. “It’s exciting to have the opportuMadison nity to dream a little bigger,” she says. Post gushed after Cawthorn’s speech that, “He truly is a rising GOP Cawthorn Read our 2016 Person of the Year profile star,” while Karin Wllison, writing for The Mighty, dug into the ways that of Torres, newmobility.com/2016/01/reveCawthorn’s performance played into harmful disability tropes. Add those ca-torres, and Dalzell’s poignant story from our to a recent controversy over a ranking House Republican who posted a COVID-19 issue, newmobility.com/2020/05/ doctored video of Barkan on his Twitter account, and it looks like disability life-in-the-time-of-covid-19. in America has become a partisan cudgel, just like everything else.
