Governor Healey’s proposed budget cuts to mental health, social services, and in particular to the Pappas Rehabilitation Hospital are reflective of the cruelty that so many vulnerable and disabled children are subjected to in Massachusetts. Sadly, it’s a sobering reminder of how societal attitudes and policies of the mid-twentieth century perpetuated harsh and inhumane treatment of those who had no voice.
Governor Healey’s callousness toward severely disabled children who require intensive long-term care at the Pappas Rehabilitation Hospital demonstrates reckless indifference to the most vulnerable children in the Commonwealth. Her unceremonious dismissal of legitimate concerns regarding the closure is deeply disturbing.
The claim that some disabled children can simply be “relocated” to a hospital over two hours away — one that has never treated pediatric patients — reveals a shocking naïveté about the traumatic and long-term impact on these children and their families.
Maybe the governor should visit those children, see their faces, how they thrive with insurmountable odds at times, and then simply explain to them that Massachusetts needs funds for things that are far more important than their happiness, sense of security, or their lives with the people they trust in what has become their home.
In the meantime, executive branch officials and the legislature must remember that every child at the Pappas Hospital has rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits the state from creating barriers to appropriate accommodations for the disabled.
To treat the Pappas residents and their families with such abject indignity with the cold and uncaring swipe of a pen, is simply indefensible and unconscionably cruel.
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