The Basics

Life changes a lot when you become disabled, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a satisfying life. It just means that you’re going to have to learn new ways of doing things and that some things in your life will change.

This article will help you answer a series of important questions about these changes in your life:

• Where can I get help?
• What are my rights as a disabled person?
• What sort of health coverage can I get?
• Are there any cash benefits that can help me?
• What will happen with my job?
• How can I get trained for a different job?

Sometimes the answers to these questions are very confusing. You may already be dizzy from hearing about MA, MA-EPD, SSI, SSDI, VRS, ILCs, the ADA, LTD, and many other programs.

In this article, we don’t expect you to know what all of these programs are. Instead, we’ll answer the questions above by presenting basic information about all of the programs that can support you, beginning by listing their complete names and then presenting a few paragraphs about each that tell you:

• What these benefits provide
• How you get them
• When they’re a good option
• How to find detailed information about them on DB101

By organizing the information in this way, you can think of this as your first lesson in disability resources, programs, and benefits.

This article covers many of the same issues that are covered in DB101’s Progressive Disability article. The difference is that this article assumes that you just became disabled, for instance in an automobile accident, and don’t know much about the benefits that are available. The other article is for people who have disabilities that evolve over time and so it explores how things could change in the future.