While in many ways, the Lantermann Act is the penultimate case management model, it does have a vendor of services or in DD bureaucratic jargon, purchase of services component that can create a variety of choices and encourage innovation. While it has been a 30-year fight to even have a consumer perspective, I have worked as a professional and have been published. To many of us who have ended up living with a disability, consumer perspective means thank you for saying something, now the people who really know will take over. This is a model for people with disabilities and their circle of support to take over. Today, power is in the hands of strangers with degrees.
Many people have power and use it appropriately within regulatory freedom.
Our model would not allow a Regional Center Doctor for example to fight procedures because it would establish precedent for purchase of services. If we can not discuss power and manipulation, both good and bad, in human services and continue to stop any discussion because it is not nice to criticize the helping professions, then the discussion becomes one of only getting more funding for more of the same. Some in the disability community hold that all we need is people with disabilities running the system rather than face the truth, the system is broken and needs fix en no matter how many people with disabilities are employed. Case mangers cannot be trusted and our system supports that yet we have to operate on the assumption that they are all good. Just the institutionalized and formal lie of attendant wages in Marin County is a great example.