Michael Neil, PhD

My name is Michael Neil and I am a Denver native raised in the Park Hill neighborhood. I have Spina Bifida and Upper Motor Neuron Dysfunction.  I began my volunteering as a political organizer in 1998 by phone-banking with the Gail Schoettler for Governor campaign. I then helped form the Green-Democratic Alliance at Colorado College in the wake of the 2000 election and was a part of both my Amnesty International Chapter and Colorado College Fair Labor from 2000-2003. I was an intern for Colorado Progressive Coalition in 2002. In graduate school at the University of Denver, I joined the Center on Rights Development from 2006-2007 and the DU Task Force on Modern Slavery from 2007 to 2008. After I began my dissertation work, I stepped back from official political organizing for a few years to focus on my academic work on John Rawls and the intersection of theories of democracy and disability politics and citizenship. Upon my dissertation completion in 2013, I became a part-time ADA Compliance Investigator for the Civil Rights Enforcement and Education Center. From 2015 to 2016, I was appointed by the Governor to the Disability Benefit Support Contract Committee, which became the Disability Funding Council in 2016, and which I have chaired since late 2017. I also joined the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition in 2015 as a legislative liaison.  Throughout my life, I have been a consumer of both Medicaid and Medicare and have tried to show how beneficial it has been to never worry about whether my multitudes of doctor’s visits or any of my eighteen surgeries would be covered. Through these experiences, I have become a great supporter of single-payer healthcare, recognizing some of the drawbacks in the current system while realizing that almost nothing of my care would have been paid by a private employer-driven health insurance system.