June 2014 marks the 15 th anniversary of the United States Supreme Court's landmark civil rights decision in Olmstead v. L.C., finding that the unjustified institutionalization of people with disabilities is illegal discrimination. While many cases are resolved without involving the courts, during the last 15 years, the lower courts have had the opportunity to apply Olmstead in a number of contexts, resulting in decisions furthering community integration for people with disabilities. This issue brief...

Surveys of consumers or their families and caregivers are an essential means of assessing quality in the delivery of home and community-based services (HCBS). A substantial number of such surveys have been fielded for the purpose either of measuring HCBS quality generally or of specific aspects of HCBS quality. Other surveys not developed for HCBS nevertheless measure concepts that are important in HCBS quality, such as life satisfaction or community participation. As the need for...

As people with disabilities have greater opportunities to live and participate fully in their

Novelist, screenwriter, and HBO showrunner Tom Perrotta joins his old friend Mark Wollaeger (who also happens to be a top scholar of modernism) for a wide-ranging conversation about literature, television, and everything in between. Tom reveals that he has been reading a most peculiar self-help book: Richard Ellmann's biography of James Joyce. Mark then shares some juicy Joyce anecdotes before getting into the nitty gritty of style and craft. We discuss balancing difficult themes with...

The Community Living Policy Center and the Institute for Health and Aging partnered to conduct an evaluation of Cal MediConnect (CMC). One goal of this evaluation was to assess beneficiaries' experiences with care, include access, quality, and coordination over time. To that end, researchers conducted a longitudinal telephone survey with three groups of dually eligible beneficiaries: those enrolled in CMC, those who opted out, and those in non-demonstration (non-CCI) counties. Key findings from the first...

As a growing number of states adopt Managed Long-Term Services and Supports frameworks, it becomes imperative that ongoing efforts to promote HCBS over institutional services continue and are integrated into the incentives and requirements of managed care contracts. Managed care can help states accelerate the shift towards the community--or slow and reverse it, depending on the incentives put into requests for proposals and contract language.

Surveys of consumers or their families and caregivers are an essential means of assessing quality in the delivery of home and community-based services (HCBS). A substantial number of such surveys have been fielded for the purpose either of measuring HCBS quality generally or of specific aspects of HCBS quality. Other surveys not developed for HCBS nevertheless measure concepts that are important in HCBS quality, such as life satisfaction or community participation. As the need for...

The decentralized nature of Home and Community-Based Services, and the fact that many HCBS providers travel to an individual’s home rather than service recipients traveling to provider facilities, have presented real difficulties for policymakers and advocates seeking to determine the most appropriate means of measuring network adequacy for LTSS providers. This report outlines multiple options that are available to state policymakers seeking to evaluate network adequacy for HCBS providers under MLTSS programs.

First issued in 2014, the Home and Community Based Settings Rule seeks to ensure that the limited Medicaid funding dedicated to Home and Community Based Services (HCBS) funds settings that are truly home-and community based in nature, rather than settings that retain the characteristics of institutions. As a result of advances in federal public policy and civil rights law, coupled by demands from people with disabilities and their advocates for greater community-based options, states have...

Before new training standards took effect in Washington State in 2012, prior standards for personal care aides (PCAs) were uniform but inadequate. In response, the regional home care union passed a ballot initiative that expanded curricular learning objectives, increased training hours, and introduced certification requirements for all PCAs. With these changes, Washington raised the bar nationwide for PCA training and certification; however, home care leaders remain concerned that certification rates are too low. This report...

MFP was first authorized through the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 with strong bipartisan support. The program was extended in the Affordable Care Act through September 2016, with flexibility to use funding through 2018. Since then, there have been five short-term extensions to keep the program afloat.

By examining response patterns to questions about Jewish attitudes, the study identified five different types of Jewish identity among the young adults who applied to go on a Birthright trip in summer 2018: Ancestry, Secular Peoplehood, Casual Religious, Connected, and Committed. After sorting applicants into groups corresponding to their Jewish identity type, the study examined the ways in which participants in the different groups were impacted by their Birthright experience. Specifically, the study asked:

This report makes the case for philanthropic investment in racially, culturally and socioeconomically diverse K-12 public schools. We offer an overview of work in this field, its evolution, its growing popularity, supportive research base and hopeful contemporary examples. We provide a variety of paths for funders to support this work in ways that align with common philanthropic strategies and priorities. This report was informed by interviews with educators and other practitioners working towards diverse, equitable...

Today's guest is Princeton's Jan-Werner Müller, (Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought, Constitutional Patriotism) author of What is Populism? (2016) which explores how the identitarian logic of populism can come to lodge within democracies. Is the current success of the antidemocratic Right (in Hungary and Poland-and increasingly elsewhere in Europe as well) the product of "plutocratic populism"? Or is there some other more systemic...

People with disabilities are deciding to be parents at increasing rates, and researchers are starting to pay attention.

Cyclic mono- and di-nucleotides are essential signaling molecules involved in many cellular processes. Cellular levels of cyclic nucleotides are fine-tuned by metal-dependent phosphodiesterases (PDEs), such as the histidine-aspartate (HD)-domain proteins. The large histidine-aspartate (HD)-domain protein superfamily contain metalloproteins that share common structural features but catalyze vastly different reactions. This thesis focuses on the characterization of three HD-domain PDEs: i) the tandem domain HD-[HD-GYP] PDE, VCA0681 (V-cGAP1), ii) the prototypical single domain HD-GYP PDE, VCA0931 (V-cGAP3),...

The genetic counseling (GC) community has long struggled with increasing racial and ethnic diversity within the profession, with the most recent Professional Status Survey (PSS) in 2021 indicating 90% White membership. While several studies have tried to pinpoint what barriers exist that make it difficult for applicants who are historically underrepresented in medicine (hURM) to enter the profession, none have examined the GC admissions process itself and how that may contribute. The aim of this...

Butter-lider is a musical setting of prerecorded samples of four Yiddish texts, recited by the writers themselves. I intend for these sounds to showcase the musicality of a language that has previously been stereotyped as a “jargon” and had its cultural products neglected and ridiculed even by its own members. I also wish for this project to investigate the role that recordings and preservationist ideologies have had in redefining Yiddish language and culture across today’s...

Contrary to the long-accepted “standard narrative” of a nineteenth century collapse, agri- culture in Massachusetts was stable through the first half of the twentieth century and reached its peak—“both in pounds and in dollars”—during World War II. Farmers made the transition from family-oriented production to commercial production over the course of the nineteenth century, and like the rest of the country’s farmers, intensified their operations in the twentieth century. Farmers specialized in a handful of...

Cochlear Implants (CIs) have seen increasing use among older adults with severe to profound hearing loss who can no longer benefit from conventional hearing aids. Although the sounds produced by CIs are severely degraded as compared with natural speech, under ideal circumstances many post-lingually deafened young and older adult CI users can perform quite well on clinical tests of sentence comprehension and recall. A notable deficit appears, however, when CI users hear especially rapid speech,...

There are millions of blind and low vision individuals in the United States, and many genetic disorders are associated with vision loss. Coupled with the growth of the genetic counseling field, it is important that we identify ways to improve the genetic counseling experience for this patient population. As genetic counseling strives to be more accessible to all, regardless of race, socioeconomic, or disability status, it is important to gather the opinions of those groups...

Summer camps are powerful educational tools that have been utilized for decades as socialization enterprises to espouse values that meet an organization’s or individual’s vision of a better future. For many years, those educational tools included the stereotypical portrayal of Native American and Black cultures, in the pursuit of creating ideal American citizens. After World War II, Jewish Americans were situated somewhere in between black and white in the racial matrix that existed in the...

Human caseinolytic peptidase B (CLPB) protein is an enzyme found in the intermembrane space (IMS) of the mitochondria but with a largely unknown function. It belongs to the AAA+ family of proteins that couples ATP hydrolysis to perform mechanical work. CLPB is thought to be an analog of the prokaryotic ClpB (caseinolytic peptidase B) protein and the lower eukaryotic yeast heat shock proteins (Hsp) 78 and Hsp104, each of which works to resolubilize proteins following...

Research has shown that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and other sexual and gender minority (LGBTQIA+) healthcare students experience discrimination during admissions and training. While several studies have examined the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities within the genetic counseling field, the admissions experiences of LGBTQIA+ individuals has not been explored. Through semi-structured interviews, this qualitative study investigated the experiences of ten LGBTQIA+ genetic counselors and genetic counseling students during graduate school admissions....

<strong>Background</strong>: Internalizing symptoms peak among college students during the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Social support interactions are generally beneficial in reducing internalizing symptoms, but social support interactions can also involve maladaptive coping processes, such as co-brooding. How certain factors might exacerbate the negative effect that co-brooding has on mood remain unknown. The current study investigated if trait affective empathy strengthens the relation between co-brooding and negative affect, as well as the relation between co-brooding...