Alexandra (Alixe) Bonardi | Susan L. Abend | Ari Ne'eman
The United States is home to over 330 million people (Census Bureau, 2022). National public health surveillance efforts have progressed in their ability to identify people with disabilities in the United States (CDC, 2020); however, these efforts do not yet allow for reliable identification of people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) (Krahn, 2019). Most available prevalence estimates come from the extrapolation of smaller-scale studies.
According to the US Residential Information Systems Project (2022), there were 7.43 million people of all ages with IDD in the United States in 2018, or 2.3% percent of the entire population. There are significant inequities in healthcare access and outcomes across geographic, social, and demographic contexts in the United States (Tikkanen & Abrams, 2020). Inequities faced by people with IDD have been highlighted for decades (US Surgeon General, 2002).