Lynnae Ruttledge may know better than anybody alive how limiting the term “person with disabilities” is, and how far such a person can go in the world of work and influence.
Ruttledge, 64, recently returned from a three-day disability-affairs conference in Kuwait, where she represented the United States government while pressing the points she’s pressed most of her life: people with disabilities can do everything. They develop “special skills and talents” that help them succeed. They may feel isolated as individuals, but put all those individuals together, and you’ve got a community 1 billion strong, accounting for 15 percent of the world population. That’s a powerful economic engine that we ignore at our own peril, Ruttledge said.
Look at Ruttledge herself. She was born with a partial facial paralysis — as well as legal blindness in her left eye — that had doctors confident she’d never be able to speak or eat.
“I’ve been very successful at both,” Ruttledge laughed.
She rose above childhood teasing and trauma — and then grown-up employment discrimination stemming from her mild disfigurement — first to work as a teacher but ultimately to direct state agencies in Oregon and then Washington that seek disability inclusion and vocational rehabilitation. Eventually, she was tapped by the Obama White House not once or twice, but thrice — to manage a federal agency and to help develop policies that touch people across the country and all around the world.
“I got involved at a great stage” in the evolution of new attitudes toward people with disabilities, she said. “I wanted to be significantly involved in developing disability policy. This is big-time stuff.”
Can’t say no
Ruttledge, a Michigan native, settled in Vancouver because it was convenient to her job at the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation in Olympia and to her husband Ed’s job in Portland. Ed eventually became human resources director for Intercity Transit in the Olympia area before his recent retirement; he is a frequent Columbian letter writer and independent blogger who made news recently by filing and then withdrawing a lawsuit against Clark County regarding employment policies and the controversial May 2013 hiring of state Sen. Don Benton as environmental services director.
Lynnae Ruttledge had been working in Olympia for four years when the Obama administration came calling with a heaven-sent job offer: commissioner of the Rehabilitation Services Administration. That means administering $4 billion in federal money for more than 1 million Americans with significant disabilities.
The job offer required Ruttledge to endure much the same sort of vetting as other presidential appointees: financial disclosures, personal background checks, ethics probes and even a hearing before the U.S. Senate. “Who are you, what have you done, and how are you perceived?” is how she put it. Like her husband, she is mightily opinionated, she said, but these probes have convinced her never to blog and to be circumspect about her use of social media. You won’t find even the most innocuous photos posted online of Lynnae Ruttledge at a party.
She was easily confirmed by the Senate — it wasn’t exactly a judicial-nominee-style grilling, she said — on Christmas Eve 2009, and moved to an apartment in Washington, D.C., a week later. “It was an amazing job, and I had a marvelous time,” she said. “I met with the president, and I was able to have a real impact on policy.”
Just the same, deciding to leave again was easy. She missed the Pacific Northwest and her husband, who faced some unexpected health challenges. By January 2012, she was back in Vancouver, her government service behind her — or so she thought.
The White House thought otherwise. She’d barely returned home when she was tapped to serve on the National Council on Disability, and while traveling on related business in Ireland she took a call asking if she also was available to fill a vacancy on the Commission on Long-Term Care.
She and Ed had been thinking about a leisurely retirement, she said — but they decided it could wait. “You don’t say no to the president,” Ruttledge said. More to the point: “I believe so strongly in having an impact,” she said.
Catastrophic care
Managing bureaucracies is one thing, but serving on advisory panels and commissions often is an exercise in purely partisan politics, Ruttledge said, with Republican and Democratic appointees usually voting in predictable blocs.
For example: The Commission on Long-Term Care made many important recommendations in a September 2013 report. But it ducked one huge riddle, Ruttledge said: how to pay for long-term and nursing care for people with chronic or catastrophic health conditions? Ruttledge’s deeply Democratic belief is in sharing that cost across a public risk pool; she characterized the Republican position as resolutely in favor of private savings and individual responsibility. (Long-term care was dropped from Obamacare, the new Affordable Care Act, before it was implemented.)
“We need a public policy about catastrophic insurance and Medicaid,” she said. “What happens when you are a successful person in the middle of your career and you have a catastrophic accident?” Currently, she said, you need to buy your own long-term care insurance — or spend down all your assets and “become poor” before any Medicaid benefits kick in.
The report was eventually approved by a majority of the 15-member commission; because it took no position on financing, Ruttledge joined the bloc of six “no” votes. The question of long-term care now moves to Congress.
War and wealth
In poor nations she’s visited — both as a government representative and as a private consultant on inclusion and rights — war and disaster are chief causes of a whole “culture of disability,” Ruttledge said. That means too few resources, widespread misery and a focus on simple survival, she said.
Kuwait is different, because that nation has resources to lavish upon disabled citizens, she said. “Resources are not the problem” in Kuwait, she said. According to the U.S. State Department, Kuwait is the eighth-richest country in the world per capita — placing just behind the United States, which is seventh.
But Kuwait is ahead of the U.S. in at least one respect, Ruttledge said: It has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The United States has not. President Barack Obama signed the convention in 2009, but the divided Senate, which has the power to ratify international treaties, declined. That’s because of United Nations detractors who dislike the very idea of international treaties that appear to infringe on American sovereignty, Ruttledge said. (At present, 158 nations have signed the treaty and 138 have ratified it.)
Meanwhile, Ruttledge said that wherever she goes, she finds the same sorts of disability issues that are just “layered differently.” Regardless of resources, she said, expectations about achievement and independence are almost always too low.
In Kuwait she met a young man named Abdulaziz Al-Mutairi, who grew up with muscular dystrophy and all the adaptive technologies and human help he could possibly want, she said. But when he became an exchange student at Syracuse University in New York state, his appetite for independence was seriously whetted. He didn’t want to be treated like an overgrown child anymore.
“Abdulaziz was used to having everything done for him, but what he experienced in America was so much more enjoyable,” Ruttledge said. “He learned to use public transportation, he learned to independently transfer from his wheelchair, he learned to depend on himself. He is now able to see his life (as) one that he controls. It’s a tantalizing realization and grants him freedom that money doesn’t buy.”
That’s the overall message Ruttledge brings everywhere she goes, she said. “Caring parents and families can provide a standard of living that makes life with a disability more comfortable,” she said. But there’s still a high price, she said, and that’s a world that “sees you only as your disability,” she said.
The better way, she said, is coupling crucial resources with high expectations.
“I have seen the power of people with disabilities learning their rights and discovering their gifts,” Ruttledge said. “My disability has opened up more doors than anyone ever could have expected.”
