COMMUNITY FIRST
ADAPT Activists Demonstrate at NGA Meeting
Hundreds of ADAPT activists braved eight
hours of Washington snow, rain and cold to assure that the National Governors
Association (NGA) would pass a “community first” resolution at their winter
meeting. The language in the final document contained some of what ADAPT has
been demanding from the governors since July at the NGA annual meeting in
Seattle, Wash., but omitted language on Olmstead, the U.S. Supreme Court
decision that affirmed the rights of people with disabilities to choose to live
free in the community.
The
final document included all aspects of Medicaid and Medicare, and did
specifically address ADAPT’s demands in statements like one of the listed
principles for change, “follow the principle that money should follow the
individual, not a provider or facility.”
The
document additionally addressed ADAPT’s push to see the majority of Medicaid
longterm care funding redirected to support community alternatives over
institutional ones, the opposite of what happens now. In a section titled
“rebalancing the long term care system” the governors agreed that
“consumer- directed home and community- based care is preferable” and should
be guided by the “preferences of the individual receiving long term care
support.”
What
the document didn’t include was ADAPT’s language that the “NGA work with
the individual states to assure that the Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision is
aggressively implemented and that the measure of this implementation be, in a
year, how many people have gotten out of nursing homes and other institutions
and how many people have been diverted from nursing homes and other
institutions.”
In
fact, in the final document, the NGA refused to include listing MiCASSA, the
Medicaid community-based Attendant Services and Supports Act of 2005, or the
Money Follows the Person legislation,” said Randy Alexander, ADAPT organizer
from Memphis, Tenn. “And they frankly rejected any so-called federal mandates
like the Olmstead decision.”
The
governors document did request that Congress and the administration change the
institutional bias currently in Medicaid so that states can “offer elderly and
disabled beneficiaries a more balanced choice between nursing home and community
based services.” With removal of the institutional bias, NGA says that states
will be able to concentrate on “focused efforts to build the capacity of
community supports,” so they will be readily available to people who desire
them.
Finally,
the NGA resolution seeks Congressional support to help states build “the
infrastructure needed to provide home and community-based long term care
services,” both in terms of workforce and other supports and services
necessary for “transition from institutional care to community-based”
living.
“We
got as much as we could from the NGA as a group,” said Steve Verriden, ADAPT
organizer from Madison, Wis. “Now we need to take it back to our individual
states and hold our individual governors accountable to the principles they
approved in this document and to the law of the land, as affirmed by the U.S.
Supreme Court Olmstead decision. The bottom line is to get and keep people with
disabilities of all ages out of nursing homes and other institutions.”