A Coalition for Change

As early as 2000, the American Diabetes Association and the Epilepsy Foundation started sowing the seeds for going back to Congress to strengthen the law. A former California congressman, Tony Coelho, focused national attention on how the rights of people with disabilities were being eroded. Coelho, who has epilepsy, had plenty of reason to be concerned. A Democratic member of the House of Representatives for a decade, he had risen in 1986 to become majority whip. His signature achievement was sponsoring the original Americans with Disabilities Act. Now he saw his law being remade and, in his view, gutted by the courts.

A coalition to change the law, led by ADA's Arent, Epilepsy's Finucane, and others, started to build. By 2006, it gained critical mass, as disability rights advocates found allies in Congress ready to take on the issue. Key players included House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), and Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). The coalition helped congressional staffers craft wording to restore what they believed was the 1990 law's original intent: to broadly protect the rights of people with disabilities. Congress heard testimony from people like diabetes advocate and pharmacist Stephen Orr, who described how he lost his job because he had diabetes. Advocates sent more than 73,000 e-mails to Congress, met with elected officials, made phone calls, and had letters to the editor published.

Where To Find Help
If you believe you have been
dis­criminated against because of your diabetes, call the American Diabetes Association at 1-800-DIABETES (1-800-342-2383) to re­quest a free packet of informa­tion, plus assistance from a legal advocate.

Ultimately, disability rights advocates joined last year with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business leaders to hammer out a compromise. The measure passed unanimously in both the House and the Senate. Two years after the first congressional hearings on reforming the law, President Bush signed the ADAAA, restoring the protections in the original legislation that his father, President George H.W. Bush, had signed 18 years earlier. 

The ADAAA addresses the definition of "disability" more specifically than the original law did, emphasizing that the word should be interpreted broadly. It states that mitigating measures shall not be considered in assessing whether or not a person has a disability. It clarifies that an impairment that "substantially limits one major life activity need not limit other major life activities in order to be a disability." And, importantly for people with diabetes, it expands the definition of "major life activities" to include a list of bodily functions such as that of the endocrine system.

The new law protects against more than workplace discrimination. People with diabetes and other chronic diseases often face problems in schools, day care centers, and places of public accommodation like restaurants, amusement parks, and concert venues. "The changes [established by the new law] will have a great effect in a wide variety of ways," Griffin says. "Some schools would take the position that a child is doing so great with their pump or insulin injections that they don't have a disability and don’t have a right to an education plan at school." These plans, which are created under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, another federal antidiscrimination law that was also amended by the ADAAA, lay out how a child's diabetes care can be managed at school. Without such protections, kids with diabetes would have no guarantee of full inclusion in the classroom.