Myths About Guardianship

Dohn Hoyle, Partners in Policymaking Faculty Member, Activist and Organizer
14. Myths About Guardianship
We see across the map is in some places people are at least told you can't get what you need unless you have a guardian. We hear the people told that by the Social Security Administration even though that's clearly false. That's right in the POMS it says that's not the case. And then we hear departments do it.
We were told that in order to get Medicaid at one point you had to do that, or in order to get waiver services, especially, you had to do that. And the state might require it, but boy, Medicaid doesn't require it. And it isn't a, this belief that you have to do that in order to get something is sometimes true. There are states where that happens. I'm thinking of a couple right now. But it isn't true in most states, and even where it is true, it can be fought.
Okay. And I'm not saying that people don't lead you down that road anyway because they do, they can't imagine anything else. And asking the question, "What do we do instead?" is part of that process. What do we do instead? Instead of taking your rights away, what do we do instead? I mean, it leads me to a place that it leads me to a place that says we've been led down lots of wrong paths. And some of it's intentional and some of it's just habit.
This is a part of both. Part of both are are in this one. It's what we've been doing and that's why the numbers keep increasing. We're not going in the other direction. The numbers keep increasing across the country of people who are subject to having rights.