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Auschwitz on Sesame Street

LUCY GWIN
Lucy is an uppity crip
who publishes Mouth magazine.

FROM
The Ragged Edge:
The Disability Experience from the Pages
of The Disability Rag
Edited by Barrett Shaw

The last this insurance company heard, their policyholder was in a coma. Once he was discharged from the hospital to a rehabilitation center, the bills began to pour in. He was receiving Recreational Therapy, billed at $110 per hour, five hours a day seven days a week – this in addition to the $1,100 day rate being charged for his care.

That’s where an MD I know – let’s call her Dr. Donna – came in. This insurance company hired her to fly in and take a look.

Donna, disabled herself, noted Telltale Sign #1 as soon as she arrived on the rehab center’s grounds: a mob of clients sitting at picnic tables outside the center’s back door. Some crouched together in groups, smoking cigarettes, talking among themselves about how their lives used to be, before.

Was this the $110-per-hour recreational therapy? Donna wondered.

She was met by a tour guide who, Donna says, "was a woman of exceptional stupidity. Plus she had no idea who I was." Who Donna was: the only MD who raised early warnings about rehab to the media, to congressional subcommittees, to teaching hospitals and to state departments of health. Dr. Donna herself had run a hospital’s in-patient rehab. She’d first heard disturbing rumors and later got the word from families themselves about the horrors going on in the name of rehabilitation.

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