Dollars and Disability: How a Cost-Benefit Formula Can Spring
People From Care Facilities

Cornell researcher working on dollar impact formula to help people with disabilities receive the services they need to live on their own.

Contact: Andrew Houtenville, ajh29@cornell.edu
or Anne Sieverding, acs5@cornell.edu
Phone: (607) 255-5702
 
FOR RELEASE: April 2007

LAWRENCE, KAN. – A new mathematical formula may be the answer for people who want to live in their home communities instead of care facilities. Specifically, a disability dollars-and-cents eye opener is the ticket out, according to Andrew Houtenville, Cornell University senior research associate.

“While costs and benefits are difficult to measure,” Houtenville, Employment and Disability Institute, said, “arguments of net benefits and cost-effectiveness are very powerful.”

His conceptual framework will draw insights from existing research and models based on cost versus benefits, time and production, and the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health. Without such a cost-benefit formula, people may lose or never get the services they need to live in their own home.

The lack of cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness data itself may pose a threat to provision of independent living services, because utilization of such data is a criterion in recent government accountability assessments, said Houtenville, who has done previous economical analyses related to disability issues.

Independent living, which is a philosophy, civil rights movement, and practice, means that people with disabilities should experience life as everyone else does and know best what services they need to live on their own.

The study is funded by the National Institute of Disability Rehabilitation Research. It is one of several studies being done by the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Measurement and Interdependence in Community Living at the University of Kansas with a consortium of scientists at Cornell University, Washington University, the University of Montana, and the Oregon Health Sciences University.

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Employment and Disability Institute
303B ILR Extension Building
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
 
Fax: 607-255-2763
Email: ajh29@cornell.edu