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- ADAPT (660)
This page continues the article from Image 653. Full text is available on 653 for easier reading. - ADAPT (661)
This page continues the article from Image 653. Full text is available on 653 for easier reading. - ADAPT (658)
[Headline] National Activism By Mike Boyd In following up on the letter from the President of the Survivors Advisory Council, published in the last edition of the Journal, members of the JMA Survivors Advisory Council went to Baltimore, April 27-May 2, 1991 to report on ADAPT (American Disabled for Attendant Pro-grams Today) and their action to secure what they define as one of the leading problems facing the seriously disabled, the services of "Attendant Care." In speaking with Diane Coleman, ADAPT organizer, attorney and friend, I developed a much greater appreciation for the dedication of ADAPT members and their fight to redirect existing federal funding to better assist the estimated 7.7 million people in the United States who require help on a daily basis. It is estimated that approximately half of these people are not getting the necessary support (World Institute on Disability). According to ADAPT, nursing home costs aver-age over $30,000 per citizen per year, while enabling individuals to live in their own homes with these services would cost approximately 25% of that figure, or $7,500 per year. This cost savings in dollars is incredible, but the difference in quality of living goes beyond any description in terms of what we are promised in the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Claude Holcomb, another ADAPT activist stated, 4'1 was in a nursing home for thirteen years. I had to fight to get out. It was the beginning of my life at 22." Many others traveled to the demonstrations from all over the United States to try and convince Louis Sullivan, Secretary of Health and Human Services, that disability funding was being misspent at the expense of the very people it was intended to help. Three days of attempted negotiations at the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), Social Security Administration (SSA), and in Washington, D.C. produced national attention. ADAPT demonstrators blocked the entrances and exits of government buildings, shutting down the agencies in protest of what some said are anti-disabled policies. No arrests took place. Some contend that the overfund-ing of institutionalization benefit-ting private corporations and the underfunding of ATTENDANT SERVICES to assist PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES is a dramatic statement of the "Plantation System Mentality" that still exists in our nation's capitol and exploits the disabled and mars promises of equal rights. Nate Butler makes a profound point in an interview in Head-Stand, the publication of the Mary-land Head Injury Foundation: "The disability movement doesn't incorporate brain injuries and brain injured people don't like to be a part of the disability movement." The comment is an overgeneralization, but one that we need to address in our own search for equality and the promises of the American Dream. An injury to One is an injury to All, we need to band together." We certainly owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the ADAPT leadership acid their role 6n the ADA, Americans with Disabilities Act, which has been described as the greatest piece of Disability Civil Rights legislation ever enacted. - ADAPT (648)
[Headline] ADAPT hits Baltimore to press nursing home issue with Sullivan In ADAPT's largest action yet on behalf of attendant services, more than 225 wheelchair activists rolled into Baltimore and Washington, D.C., at the end of April, where they seized control of two federal buildings and brought traffic to a standstill at Baltimore's busiest intersection at the height of the rush hour. Demonstrators had hoped to force a meeting with Dr. Louis Sullivan, secretary for Health and Human Resources, but as usual Sullivan refused to discuss ADAPT's demand that Medicaid monies be transferred from nursing home pro-grams to attendant services. On the first day of the action, demonstrators blocked the 44 entrances leading into a Social Security Administration building in Baltimore. Some four or five wheelchair pickets blocked each entrance until police started moving in at 3 p.m. "There was no way we could continue to block that many doors if they started hauling us away," ADAPT spokesman Wade Blank said. "So we announced we were heading back for our hotel. The cops were real pleased it ended that easily." It didn't, though. Instead of returning to the hotel, the 225 activists wheeled their way into a nearby busy intersection and brought traffic to a halt until 7 p.m., when the demonstrators decided to call it a night. It was three days before traffic got back to normal on those roads," Blank said. On the second day, ADAPT targeted another Social Security building, one that had only two entrances, although the parking lot held nearly 3,000 cars. While police officers in what appeared to be SWAT uniforms and riot gear watched, ADAPT blocked the two doors and refused to allow workers inside to leave the building. Some of the federal employees corn-plained that they had children to pick up and should be allowed to pass through the pickets. "Now you know how disabled people who are locked up in nursing homes feel," they were told. On the third day, ADAPT boarded buses and headed into Washington, D.C. where they set up pickets outside the Hubert H. Humphrey federal build-ing. A line of 225 wheelchair activists stretched from corner to corner in the street opposite the front of the building. Police countered by establishing a barrier of police cars in front of the building with officers filling the spaces between the cars to stop any attempt by ADAPT to rush the building. A signal was given and all 225 demonstrators started rolling toward the building. But when they reached the police barricade, the 225 pulled them-selves out of their chairs and began to crawl over the police cars, chanting: "We want Sullivan! We want Sullivan!" The police had earlier decided on a non-arrest strategy and while they were pondering a response, several of the activists sneaked around the lines and kryptonited the locks of the building doors which effectively knocked them out of commission. "The press went nuts," Blank said. At 6 p.m. ADAPT leaders explained their demands in a live news conference that was carried on all three of the network affiliates. "The nursing home industry knows now that it is going to have to take us seriously," Blank said. Blank said that many of the 225 demonstrators were residents of nursing homes. Others were unable to participate in the action because the homes told them they would be locked out if they participated in an anti-nursing home demonstration. - ADAPT (643)
"The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those the suppress." Fredrick Douglas, 1849 - ADAPT (646)
[Headline] Radical disabled activists resist 'warehousing' By MARY JOHNSON Special to the Guardian Baltimore-- The feisty disabled-rights activists of ADAPT have a new target. Having declared victory in the battle over access to public transit, they are applying their well-honed direct-action strategy to changing the U.S. policy of warehousing disabled people in nursing homes. The enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act in July 1990 prompted the group to move on from their 8-year bus battle since the new law requires wheelchair lilts on all new buses. (The shift of targets has required a name change: formerly called American Disabled for Action on Public Transit, the group now makes its acronym stand for American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today.) Many question the Bush administration's commitment to disability rights under the disability rights act as long as disabled people are forced to live in nursing homes against their will. Despite the publicity last year surrounding Larry McAfee. the severely disabled Georgia man who sought court permission to end his life rather than live in a nursing home. the Bush administration has refused to examine the government policy of funding nursing-home stays over in-home assistance. In a news conference last May, the president would only say, "We ought to take a look at changing it." [Subheading] DIRECT-ACTION STRATEGY' "I wouldn't hold my breath." says Allan Bergman, United Cerebral Palsy's national deputy director for governmental activities. Even before the passage of the act, Bergman was interested in turning up the heat on the nursing home issue with what he called "a different kind of strategy." Nearly 300 severely disabled activists descended on this city during the last week-end in April to do just that. Many of them were among the group that shut down the Capitol Rotunda in March 1990 calling for passage of the disability rights law. On April 29 and 30, ADAPT surrounded the health care administration and Social Security offices here, at one point snarling rush-hour traffic at a nearby intersection for over an hour, and at another blocking an employee parking lot. forcing police to cut a fence and bulldoze a makeshift exit so workers could leave. There were no arrests, however. ADAPT turned its attention on May I to the Department of Health and Human Services offices in Washington, disrupting a press conference for Health Care Financing Administration head Gail Wilensky. Another culprit. as ADAPT sees it, is the nursing home industry's trade group, the American Health Care Association. ADAPT says the association has been able to convince the administration that Medicaid funds earmarked for the disabled should go to nursing homes instead of paying for vastly less expensive and more dignified in-home services. ADAPT organizer Mike Auberger believes it will take 3 to 4 years to organize enough people around the issue to see a change, but points out that the bus battle took 8 years. "This issue affects almost everyone who's disabled," he says, unlike the transit issue, which wasn't relevant to people who could afford their own transportation. "This cuts across all levels. Everybody can relate to needing to get up and get dressed." "The entire force of the disability rights community must he brought to bear on an effort to get a national attendant services program," says Charles Cam director of an independent living center in Massachusetts. Carr worries that ADAPT's agenda is too narrow and focuses only on people in wheelchairs: he believes things like interpreters for deaf people and readers for blind people should he pan of the definition of "attendant services." Still, what drives many in working on this issue is avoiding nursing homes. "Nobody wants to go into a nursing home. That should tell us something." says ADAPT's Wade Blank. "That's a real unity-builder." Medicaid's requirement that disability funds he used in institutions isn't written into the law. says attorney and ADAPT organizer Diane Coleman. Rather. she says, it's due to the American Health Care Association's lobbying efforts that the vast hulk of Medicaid and Medicare money is allotted to nursing homes. Last year people in this country shelled out over $46 billion for nursing home stays—half of that coming from either Medicare or Medicaid. The Long Term Care Campaign and other groups put the Lost or an average nursing home stay at between $30.000 and $60,000 a year. Yet disability groups. including the World Institute on Disability, say a disabled person living in their own home and paving an attendant for personal services like help with dressing, bathing and getting in and out of bed aced spend only about $15,000 a year. This is not for 24-hour attention, and it isn't for the services of a highly trained nurse. But. ADAPT organizer Wade Blank points to a Feb. 28 New England Journal of Medicine editorial, which noted that most people in nursing homes receive the equivalent of only 3 to 4 hours of care a day in the loon of simple personal assistance, not "nursing care." What ADAPT wants. they say. is simple: They want Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan to transfer $5 billion from the $23 billion in federal funds now going to nursing homes and direct it to a national "attendant services" program. Such a program would allow disabled people to receive assistance in their own homes rather than being forced into a nursing home because they need help with things like bathing, dressing and eating. Disabled rights activists are convinced that the medical approach to home care drives up prices and insist that disabled people need simple assistance, not nursing care. Activists therefore maintain that "attendant services" must allow disabled people to do their own hiring and firing and he in control of their own care, if they so choose. Sullivan has so far refused to meet with ADAPT, though they've followed him around the country, confronting him in Nashville. Tenn., in January and at his alma mater, Atlanta's Morehouse College, last fall. [Subheading] A $50 BILLION-A-YEAR INDUSTRY ADAPT representatives did meet with American Health Care Association Director Paul Willging in Denver a few months ago. Willging was frank in telling the group that the nursing home business was "a $50 billion-a-year industry." If ADAPT wanted to take money from them to fund attendant services. they'd oppose it. he said. "Right now attendant services are a matter of states' rights." says Coleman. Though some states have waivers from current Medicare rules to allow disabled people to receive services in their homes, the Health Care Financing Administration in recent years has granted fewer and fewer of these waivers. A coalition of disability and seniors groups in Tennessee, including Tennessee ADAPT, pressed the Tennessee Medicaid Commission recently to file a waiver request, but the group was turned down. A group in Mississippi pressed the Mississippi Medicaid Commission last fal to file a waiver request with the Health Care Financing Administration to start a tiny program for in-home service. They did, but the administration has denied the request three times—over the protests of the Mississippi congressional delegation. In November the delegation sent a letter to the administration objecting to the denial. "We are convinced." they wrote, "that a consumer-directed model is the kind of program we need to have in our state." Though ADAPT does not represent the entire disability rights movement. their [image] [image caption] After winning the 8-year battle for wheelchair lifts on its new buses, disability activists in ADAPT shifted their focus to target the government policy of funding nursing homes over cheaper and more dignified home care. [text continues] direct-action strategy has been hard to ignore. "I don't agree with their tactics," says Mike Yeager of Disability Focus. a public policy group. "they're real aggressive. But somebody has to he. There aren't really enough groups willing to make a loud noise." Shel Trapp of National People's Action. a group that does direct-action training. is impressed with ADAPT. "This movement mast not be as broad-reaching as the civil rights movement in terms of numbers," Trapp says, "but I think the accomplishments will ultimately equal those of the civil rights movement." ADAPT members say they've never been opposed to making noise. "Were not going away." promises ADAPT's Mark Johnson. "We're gonna win this one—sooner or later." For more information: ADAPT, 12 Broadway, Denver, Colo. 80203; (303) 733-9324. For coverage of the disability rights movement: The Disability Rag (monthly), P.O. Box 145, Louisville, Ky. (502) 459-5343. Mary Johnson is editor of The Disability Rag. [Boxed text] Small Press Center 20 West 44th Street, New York, NY 10036 Free Readings at the Small Press Center Tues. April 9-1pm Writer Donna Ratajczak (Purgatory Pie Press) and poet Barbara Unger (Thorntrce Press) Tues. May 14 -1pm Sal Salasin (Another Chicago Press) and writer Hans Koning (Monthly Review Press) Tues. June 11-1pm Writer Coco Gordon (Water Mark Press) and author Grace Paley (The Feminist Press) These readings are also broadcast on WNYE (91.5 FM). Please call the Center at (212) 764-7021 for broadcast dates. Special Lectures Free Fri. April 26 — 6:30pm Slide Lecture — by the artist/printers of Purgatory Pic Press Fri. June 14 — 7:00pm Slide Lecture on Papermaking and Artists' Books by Coco Gordon from Water Mark Press Small Press Exhibits April — Purgatory Pie Press May — Monthly Review Press June — Water Mark Press For more information on all Small Press Events, please contact the Center at (212) 764-7021. The Center is open Monday to Thursday from 9 to 6pm and Friday from 9 to 5 pm — the Center is closed during July. - ADAPT (650)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand." Fredrick Douglass, 1849 - ADAPT (667)
[Headline] Disabled activists block off building 5/2/91 Washington (AP)- Disabled activists, including more than 100 in wheelchairs, blocked entrances to the headquarters of the Health and Human Services Department on Wednesday to protest policies that they said favor nursing homes over home care. Some of the protesters discarded their wheelchairs and crutches and tried to get past a police line securing the building. Some crawled under parked police cars and tried to squeeze past the legs of officers. There were no arrests. The group American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today, or ADAPT, wants the Medicaid program to redirect $5.5 billion to be spent on community-based attendant service programs. - ADAPT (664)
[Headline] Protesters advocate home care for disabled WASHINGTON (AP) Disabled activists, including more than 100 in wheelchairs, blocked entrances to the headquarters of the Health and Human Services Department on Wednesday to protest policies they said favor nursing homes over home care. Some of the protesters discarded their wheelchairs and crutches and tried tog et past a police line securing the building. Some crawled under parked police cars and tried to squeeze past the legs of po- [Subheading] THE STARS AND STRIPES lice officers who stood in front of the en-trances. There were no arrests. "To people like myself, this is a life and death matter," said Lee Sanders of Houston, who crawled out of his wheel-chair and laid on the ground. "It's the difference between living in a nursing home and living at home." For most of the afternoon, access to the Hubert Humphrey Building was limited to underground tunnels that connect it with other buildings. Cars also were unable to leave the parking lot under the health department's headquarters building, just a couple of blocks from the Capitol. The approximately 175 protesters, organized by a group called American Dis-abled for Attendant Programs Today, or ADAPT, want the Medicaid program to redirect 25 percent of the $23 billion it currently spends on nursing homes. They want this amount; about $5.5 billion, to be spent on establishment of community-based attendant service programs that would give disabled people the chance to stay at home rather than enter a nursing home. "Not only is it cost effective, it's the right to dignity and freedom of choice," said Mike Auberger of Denver, a co-founder of ADAPT. He said 7.7 million Americans are in jeopardy of having to go to a nursing home a cost Medicaid would pay ---- because they can't afford a home-care attendant. Medicaid has a more restrictive policy in reimbursing for home care than for nursing home stays, he said. However, he noted, nursing home care costs.in the range of $30,000 to $60,000 a year, while attendant care costs $15,000 to $30,000. Gail Wilensky, head of the Health Care Financing Administration, which administers Medicaid, said many of the problems the group is angry about are not handled by the Medicaid program. Also, she said, some state Medicaid pro-grams do cover attendant and personal care-type services. States design and operate their own Medicaid programs under broad federal guidelines. - ADAPT (657)
A group of police stand between two police cars. They stare straight ahead, not looking down, with lips pursed, hands on hips. In the background more police are standing around by the HHS building. At the feet of the group in the front ADAPT protesters are crawling around the police officers' legs. One woman is on her side partially beneath a police car, a single above the knee amputee [Julie Nolan] is squeezing between two of the officers, the legs of another person are laid before them, and in the back a fourth person is between two other officers. - ADAPT (662)
News Briefs Baltimore, Md.--Two former adversaries, Baltimore's Mass Transit Administration (MTA) and ADAPT (Americans Disabled for Attendant Programs Today, formerly Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation), recently found themselves working together. This represents a positive change from the days when ADAPT was protesting against the transit industry in an attempt to achieve accessible public transportation for people with disabilities. Since Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, ADAPT has shifted its focus from accessible transportation to attendant programs which foster community-based home care services. Recently, ADAPT members were in Baltimore to protest at the offices of the U.S. Health and Human Services Administration's Health Care Finance Administration. They needed transportation during their visit as well as for a follow-up protest at the office of U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan in Washington, D.C. MTA provided the ADAPT protesters with two accessible buses that have been converted to accommodate multiple securement positions for wheelchair users. Project ACTION Update Summer 1991 9 - ADAPT (659)
The Washington Post Thursday, May 2, 1991 C3 [image] [image caption] Phyllis Burkhead, of Louisville, who is unable to speak, spells out a message to another member of the protest. [Headline] Disabled Protesters Decry Lack of Aid By Eric Charles May and Debbi Wilgoren Washington Post Staff Writers A group of disabled people threw themselves from their wheelchairs to the ground in front of the Department of Health and Human Services yesterday to protest a lack of federal funding for home-care attendants. The demonstrators called for HHS Secretary Louis W. Sullivan to redirect Medicaid funding from nursing homes for the disabled to care provided by personal attendants, a change they said would enable more disabled people to live independent lives. "We're not talking about raising taxes, but [about redirecting money," said Mike Auberger, 36, of Denver. Auberger is a leader of the group that organized the protest, American disabled for Attendant Programs Today. He spoke to reporters after using bicycle locks to chain himself by the neck to the building, at Third Street and Independence Avenue SW. About 20 of the 110 demonstrators threw themselves from their wheelchairs and wriggled toward a barricade of police cars parked in front of the building. Six people threaded a chain through their wheelchairs and positioned themselves in front of the building's parking garage exit. "We'll make it obvious to [Sullivan] that we are serious," said Stephanie Thomas, 33, of Austin, Tex., as she looked out from under a white police sedan. HHS The released a statement saying it "shared the concerns" of the group, but did not have authority to change Medicaid funding, which is allocated by the states. Police dismantled the human blockade of the garage at 4:40 p.m. by cutting the chain with a bolt cutter and wheeling protesters away. The protesters held a news conference and then wheeled themselves toward the Federal Center Metro station in Southwest. Several motorists honked their car horns in support as the group rolled by. - ADAPT (652)
/CAPE COD TIMES THURSDAY, MAY 2 1991 [Headline] Protesters demand home-care funding [Subheading] FROM STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS WASHINGTON --- Disabled activists, including a small group of Cape Codders and more than 100 people in wheelchairs, blocked entrances to the headquarters of the Health and Human Services Department yesterday to protest policies that they said favor nursing tomes over home care. It was the third straight day of protests by the group. When police cars surrounded the group yesterday, some of them jumped out of their wheelchairs and tried to crawl under the police cars," Kent Killam, a program coordinator with Cape Organization for Rights of the Disabled (CORD), said in a telephone interview from Washington. Other activists tried to squeeze past the legs of police officers who stood in front of the entrances. There were no arrests. "To people like myself, this is a life and death matter," said Lee Sanders of Houston, who crawled out of his wheelchair and lay on the ground. "It's the difference between living in a nursing home and living at home." For most of the afternoon, access to the Hubert Humphrey Building was limited to underground tunnels that connect it with other buildings. Cars also were unable to leave the parking lot under the HHS headquarters building, just a couple of blocks from the Capitol. The protesters were trying to create an institutional-like setting, with people unable to leave the building or the parking lot, said Lisa Nikula, a CORD program coordinator. She did not attend the protest, but talked on the phone yesterday to members in Washington. "They tried to create that feeling everywhere they went, so people feel trapped inside a building and can't get out," Ms. Nikula said, comparing the situation to that of disabled people who are unnecessarily institutionalized. The demonstration ended about 6:30 p.m. and full access to the building was restored. The approximately 175 protesters, organized by a group called American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today, or ADAPT, want the Medicaid program to redirect 25 percent of the $23 billion it currently spends on nursing homes. They want this amount, about $5.5 billion, to be spent on establishment of community-based attendant service programs that would give disabled people the chance to stay at home rather than enter a nursing home. Gail Wilensky, head of the Health Care Financing Administration, which administers Medic-aid, said many of the problems the group is angry about are not handled by the Medicaid program. - ADAPT (656)
Left to right, Mike Auberger, Diane Coleman, Rick James and 2 other people block the side entrance to the Health and Human Services offices on Independence Ave. Mike's neck is kryptonite locked to the doors. Diane has a poster that reads "Stop the money to the nursing home lobby!" Behind Rick's head is a very large access symbol sign. - ADAPT (654)
Frank Lozano lies on the cement ground with a yellow poster that reads "People do not let your grandparents or elderly relatives live in nursing 'homes'." His guide dog Frazier lies beside him on one side. On his other side Lonnie Smith lies with his head resting on a wheelchair cushion. Above their heads Karen Greebon is lying on her side facing away with a partially obscured poster by her head that reads "stop inhuman services." The three are framed by Karen and Lonnie's wheelchairs.