Bill addressing disability services waiting list gets personal

House Bill 2899, one of the dozens of budget bills dropped late last week, is only four paragraphs long, and three are pro forma legislative jargon. The meat of the measure would ban new Oklahoma residents from in-home disability supports for five years and instruct the Department of Human Services to promulgate rules related to the measure.

Rep. Mark Lawson, R-Sapulpa, said HB 2899’s purpose is to assure that long-suffering Oklahoma residents are served first once the state comes up with money to cover everyone on the current list — which, Lawson said, is expected to happen next year following an assessment of how many people are awaiting services and what those will cost.

He said the intention is that the DHS rules will allow exceptions to the five-year ban for families moving to the state for jobs or military service and possibly other reasons.

Republicans were furious that the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy came out against the bill in an “action alert” email that Lawson called “Mickey Mouse” and “very misleading.”

“Not only is (HB 2899) bad policy, but the process has been abused to avoid public input and ram this through before anyone noticed,” the organization claimed in one of its emails.

Lawson, for whom the waiting list has been a priority, was particularly piqued.

“Until today, this has been the one issue where we’ve said we can put our politics aside and do the right thing,” he said.

“We’re talking about people with developmental and intellectual disabilities in their families,” he said. “Some of these people who qualify are people who can’t feed themselves. … They’re incapable of opening a can of soup. They’re incapable of grasping food and putting it in their mouth.”

Rep. Collin Walke, D-Oklahoma City, said it was not about politics but about the plain wording of the bill.

“There’s a practical problem with this bill,” Walke said. “This bill has nothing to do with cleaning up the waiting list. This bill has to do with preventing people from getting services without being a resident for five years.”

Lawson said the waiting list has about 5,800 names on it, some of whom first applied for services in 2008.

Rep. Dell Kerbs, R-Shawnee, said his daughter is one of those on the list. She joined it at age 8, Kerbs said as he dabbed at his eyes, “so that she could be taken care of, or helped to be taken care of, as an adult. … What we’re doing isn’t working. If it was, my God, we wouldn’t have the damn list!”

HB 2899 passed 78-19 and now goes to the Senate.