Commissioner O'Rielly Remarks Before the Disability Advisory Committee

The costs to American consumers for the collection of disability-related programs is growing at a fairly aggressive and unsustainable rate. Accordingly, the Disability Advisory Committee can play an important role, and I believe has an obligation, to help the Commission contain costs. I strongly believe that we need to move away from specialized services with proprietary equipment and towards increased use and adoption of modern communications technology to serve the most vulnerable populations. This means more use of email, text, video chat, real time text, and the like. Substitutable services need to be employed to a greater extent to drive down overall costs. Many of these services, which clearly will not work for every disabled consumer, are free today and provide a great means to communicate, conduct business, entertain, and offer the various myriad of features and functions that non-disabled individuals take for granted each day.  I implore you to consider how best to move away from proprietary technologies and providers. If the DAC submits recommendations along these lines, then we have a real chance to preserve our efforts to help a valuable population of Americans.