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From left, Jacob and Denise Gehringer in Washington, D.C. |
As an ambassador, Gehringer will help promote ABLE accounts, tax-free savings accounts for individuals with disabilities.
Gehringer has been a longtime advocate for the 2014 law, designed “to ease financial strains faced by individuals with disabilities by making tax-free savings accounts available to cover qualified disability-related expenses, including education, housing, and transportation expenses,” according to the ABLE National Resource Center website.
“There are 34,000 ABLE accounts open across the country,” Gehringer said. “We need 90,000 open in the next couple of years for the program to be sustainable.”
As an ambassador, Gehringer will work to reach out to families of individuals with developmental disabilities, especially families with young children, to inform them about the advantages of the accounts, which do not affect the account holder’s eligibility for public benefits, such as Medicaid.
This is only the second year the ABLE National Resource Center has selected individuals to work as ambassadors, but Gehringer is an obvious choice for the role, according to Wayne Stuberg, Ph.D., associate director of the Munroe-Meyer Institute.
“Denise and her son Jacob have been stalwart advocates for ABLE, and Jacob was the first account holder in ENABLE, Nebraska’s ABLE program,” Dr. Stuberg said. “She is a well-informed and inspired leader who has hands-on experience, having consulted with First National Bank of Omaha as they created the ENABLE accounts.”
Gehringer and Jacob also traveled to Washington, D.C., in 2014 to advocate on Capitol Hill and try to further advance the legislation before it was signed into law later that year. Jacob actually is featured in national advertising for the plans.
Now, she sees her role as sharing her knowledge with others.
“I have been knee-deep in this since it started,” she said. “I’ve participated in conference calls, taken part in outreach pushes and really worked at getting the grassroots efforts together. And now, since ENABLE accounts have become available in Nebraska, I communicate with a lot of families.
“People often have concerns or they don’t understand how the tool works — they want to hear from other people in the trenches with them. We want to get the word out on how beneficial this is.”
Gehringer praised First National Bank for its efforts in creating ENABLE accounts for Nebraskans.
“They really took a lot of time to gather the information about what people needed, what people wanted from these accounts,” she said. “First National has been a leader in ABLE fund programming across the country — ENABLE was the third ABLE program to launch nationwide, right on the heels of the first two.”
Gehringer said that in addition to advocating for use of the accounts, she’ll be working to help improve them. For one thing, she’s working with state legislatures to eliminate a Medicaid clawback provision that would allow the government to recoup money from an account after the account holder’s death.
“Now that ABLE has been around for four or five years, we’re seeing things that need to be fixed up a bit,” she said. “That’s one thing we think needs to be fixed. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that these accounts are a great benefit to persons with developmental disabilities and their families — and, as an ABLE ambassador, that’s the message I’ll be trying to spread.”