illness). Employment protection laws make discrimination against qualified individuals with a disability illegal and may also require the provision of reasonable accommodation. Reasonable accommodations includes changes in the physical environment like making facilities more accessible but also include increasing job flexibility like job restructuring, part-time or modified work schedules or reassignment to vacant position. Though many hold attitudes that are more enlightened and informed than past years, the word "disability" carries few positive connotations for most employers. Negative attitudes by employers toward potential employees with disabilities can lead to misunderstanding and discrimination. Healthcare disparities The disability paradox, a concept that recognizes the tendency for individuals without disabilities to perceive their disabled counterparts as having poorer livelihoods than disabled individuals would view themselves, is perpetuated in healthcare settings, with research published in the Handbook of Disability Studies identifying that practitioners award lower quality of life scores to disabled individuals than a member of the general population would. An article in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal expresses that as a consequence physicians frequently go into consults with rigid, skewed perceptions of their patient's disabilities. Anita Ho, a bioethicist, argues that heightened practitioner confidence can harmfully impact disabled individuals in this regard as it increases the likelihood that patients may distrust their physicians or conversely place excessive faith in their care provider's insight into their condition. Disparate in healthcare access also impact disabled populations, for instance, most rural areas — especially in the Great Plains region — have little or no government-organized medical support infrastructure for the permanently disabled indigent population which results in disability in the United States not only affecting individuals physically and mentally but socioeconomically as well. Poverty Investigations on the "poverty and disability nexus" have consistently shown poverty and disability are correlated for all race-ethnic groups within the United States. Financial stability of people with disabilities would decrease the dependence on governmental support programs. Studies have been done with the U.S. Census Bureau data to examine the high prevalence of disabilities among welfare recipients. Thirteen percent of families with children under the age of 18, who are also receiving welfare benefits, had at least one child with a disability. Families with income below twice the poverty line were 50% more likely to have a child with a disability than those families with higher incomes. Children with disabilities from families with annual household incomes of higher than $50,000 were