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91 Arrested When ADAPT Told Obama Administration Won't Support Inclusion of Long Term Services in Health Care Reform

Washington, D.C.--- Ten members of ADAPTB met with Obama Administration officials in the White House today, and came away disappointed at the lack of commitment from the administration on inclusion of long term services and supports in health care reform. The administration stated that its only commitment currently is to extend insurance to the people who are uninsured, and that the people in nursing homes and institutions would need to continue to wait until an unspecified time in the future when it is proven that the health care reform worked. Angered by that response, 500 ADAPT members immediately stretched out along the White House fence, using handcuffs and chains to secure themselves. The Capitol Police ultimately arrested 91 people.

"This is unequivocally a civil rights issue, and we thought we had a civil rights president," said Bruce Darling, ADAPT Organizer from Rochester, New York. "He took the oath of office on the Lincoln bible, and has spoken repeatedly about inclusion and integration. But after today, it seems clear that inclusion doesn't apply to us or to the thousands of people trapped for years behind institution and nursing home walls and those of us who are aging with nursing homes looming in our futures. Instead of the promised 'change' we are just getting more of the same old thing."

Obama officials in the one hour meeting with ADAPT included Nancy-Ann De Parle, Counselor to the President and Director of the White House Office of Health Reform, aka the President's Health Care Czar; Jeff Crowley, Director of Office of National AIDS Policy and an advisor on the administration's development of disability policies; Henry Claypool, Director of the Office of Disability in Health and Human Services (HHS); and Mike Hash, coordinator of the HHS-White House reform efforts.

"My heart is broken," said Dawn Russell, ADAPT organizer in Denver, Colorado. "Throughout the Presidential campaign, ADAPT worked hard to educate the Obama campaign. We came to believe in the Obama promise of 'change,' and we really believed that President Obama was the person who really would 'free our people' from being imprisoned in nursing homes and other institutions. Untold numbers of people have died or been abused waiting for th eir freedom, and we just got told we aren't important enough and so we have to keep waiting."

ADAPT will be making visits to Congress during the week, seeking more co-sponsors for the Community Choice Act, legislation which would give older and disabled Americans the choice to live in their own homes and communities with the services and supports they need. Current Medicaid policy forces people into nursing homes and other institutions in order to get the assistance they need, despite the fact that both the aging and disabled communities have consistently indicated they prefer home and community based services to the generally higher cost institutional services that rob them of control of their lives.

"The President can give millions more people health insurance, but if health care reform doesn't include long term services and supports, then all the health care in the world won't keep those people from being forced into nursing homes against their will," said Linda Anthony, ADAPT Organizer from Pennsylvania.

# # # FOR MORE INFORMATION on ADAPT visit our website at http://www.adapt.org/

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Tags: ADAPT, Rep. Barney Frank, Sen. Chris Dodd, Sen. Richard Shelby, housing, disability, civil disobedence, justice, protest, disability rights

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State Sen. Eric Kearney (D-Cincinnati) is introducing a bill that would grant people with disabilities protection under Ohio's hate crime law.

Senate Bill 349 was prompted by February's attack of Ashley Clark, a mentally disabled Talawanda High School senior.

"Anyone can become disabled ... I think people realize that it's a great equalizer," Kearney said Friday.

"Most families have somebody, a relative, who is disabled and people will empathize with that."

Hate crime laws provide additional punishment for criminal offenses if the crime can be shown to be motivated by race or animosity toward specific groups of people.

If the bill is passed, it would put disability in the same category as race, color, religion, and national origin.

"This will put people on notice that the state of Ohio views those actions with the same severity as they do crimes against any other group," said Lin Laing, executive director for Center for Independent Living Options in Cincinnati.

Kearney is a member of the center's board of directors.

Ohio is one of 23 states that do not include disability as part of their hate crimes legislation, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Does Alaska? Read more here on Cincinnati.com

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“Death is natural and necessary, but not just. It is a random force of nature; survival is equally accidental. Each loss is an occasion to remember that survival is a gift.”

Disability and human rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson died at her home in South Carolina on June 3. The world has lost a passionate and dedicated advocate for social change. Untold numbers in the disability community and beyond have lost a caring friend and role model. Johnson was a civil rights lawyer, a weaver of tales, and a spokesperson for the dignity and humanity of people with disabilities. Her articles and essays for the New York Times, including a Sunday magazine cover piece, thrust Harriet onto the national stage. She wrote passionately and with humor about a quite serious topic: her right and the rights of others, to exist in the world as a person with a disability. Her withering critique of those who would deny her existence was delivered with a calm and open-hearted voice, and her generosity of spirit was evident always.

Johnson, who was born with a neuromuscular disease, drew national attention for her opposition to "the charity mentality" and "pity-based tactics" of the annual Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethon. Lewis told the Chicago Tribune he had no intention of making peace with opponents such as Johnson. He likened the idea of meeting with them to entertaining Hezbollah or insurgents in Iraq.

The protests started after Lewis wrote a 1990 Parade magazine article in which he imagined being disabled. Among his conclusions, "I realize that my life IS half, so I must learn to do things halfway. I just have to learn to try to be good at being half a person."

Articles by Harriet McBryde Johnson

Unspeakable Conversations

He insists he doesn't want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.

Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it's . . . almost fun. Mercy! It's like ''Alice in Wonderland.''

It is a chilly Monday in late March, just less than a year ago. I am at Princeton University. My host is Prof. Peter Singer, often called -- and not just by his book publicist -- the most influential philosopher of our time. He is the man who wants me dead. No, that's not at all fair. He wants to legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me if allowed to live. He also says he believes that it should be lawful under some circumstances to kill, at any age, individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn't consider them ''persons.'' What does it take to be a person? Awareness of your own existence in time. The capacity to harbor preferences as to the future, including the preference for continuing to live.

At this stage of my life, he says, I am a person. However, as an infant, I wasn't. I, like all humans, was born without self-awareness. And eventually, assuming my brain finally gets so fried that I fall into that wonderland where self and other and present and past and future blur into one boundless, formless all or nothing, then I'll lose my personhood and therefore my right to life. Then, he says, my family and doctors might put me out of my misery, or out of my bliss or oblivion, and no one count it murder.

Not Dead at All - Why Congress was right to stick up for Terri Sciavo

Today, more than 1.7 million mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, are lost in America's disability gulag. Today's gulag characterizes isolation and control as care and protection, and the disappearances are often called voluntary placements. However, you don't vanish because that's what you want or need. You vanish because that's what the state offers. You make your choice from an array of one.

But now the gulag faces a challenge from people who know the fear firsthand.

Overlooked in the Shadows

New Mobility Magazine Person of the Year 2003: A Life Well Lived

Books by Harriet McBryde Johnson

Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life

Review here.

And here.

Accidents of Nature

Others here.

Tags: disabilityrights, ADA, Jerry Lewis Telethon, death, heroes

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While her classmates sat in their classroom in Parsons learning the three Rs, 9-year-old Allie Jones was in Washington, D.C., last week learning lessons in history, politics and life.

It is in Washington where Allie saw direct action in progress -- the same type of direct action that has led to change over the years from the civil rights movement.

Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote in a letter from Birmingham jail, "Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path? You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored."

Allie was in Washington for the 25th anniversary of ADAPT (American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today), a group that uses direct action to fight for legislation to promote services in communities instead of warehousing people with disabilities in institutions and nursing homes.

"It's about having access to everything, so they have their rights like everyone else does," Allie said.

Way to go Allie! Read more here in the Parsons Sun.

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Read more here.

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Independent Living

Indian          Lands – Notice that gap?

It is so incomprehensible to me that people with disabilities in the most dominant society that have secured the benefits of an Independent Living Center usually will not extend their service parameters to include American Indian people with disabilities when they reside on Indian Lands.

People with disabilities in the most dominant society understand, or I thought they did understand CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUES. We have one minority population discriminating against another minority population – perhaps “discriminating” is not the correct word – “disregarding” may be even more appropriate – disability disregard.

I found on the ADAPT page something very interesting about people with disabilities in the most dominant society – it was in DENVER – If you read the HISTORY of the Independent Living Movement, you will see in 1986 ADAPT invited ROSA PARKS to lead a Detroit march.

They MUST HAVE REALIZED the same connection that I see here today - Civil Rights.

Civil Rights for people with disabilities in the most dominant society – If you’re on Indian Lands the same courtesies are not extended. There is a gap and I’m working on that gap.

Will the Independent Living Centers Administration kindly extend their services to American Indian people with disabilities when they reside on Indian lands?

If you cannot do that – tell me why.
If you have found a way to do that – tell me how.

Connie Lee Berg e-mail your response: redlake679@hotmail.com

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Michele Norris talks with Habib, whose son has cerebral palsy.

Listen here. Visit the website here.

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And her home state just happens to be one of the worst in the country in terms of providing funding for at-home care, which is why members of the outspoken disability-rights organization ADAPT converged on Chicago this week for five days of "protest against Illinois systems that starve people with disabilities . . . of their rights and their independence." Donna was with them, of course.

Read more about Martin here.

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Five times in the last dozen years, bills on medically assisted suicide have risen in the California Assembly, and five times they have failed.

In every instance, a great deal of the credit for their demise goes to a constituency associated with advancing personal choice and civil rights — namely, the disability rights movement.

Read more here.

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Dickerson, who was still practicing at age 91, had a reputation as a fierce advocate for the poor and underprivileged and argued many cases involving racial and gender discrimination.

More in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

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DISCRIMINATION WATCH

"No dog, no dog," shouted the driver and another worker when District resident Joe Orozco and his guide dog tried to board a Todays Bus from Washington to New York. Orozco protested that the company is required by law to accommodate service animals, but the workers continued to block his entry and laughed, he says, when he threatened to call police. Once he called police, the workers said he could ride if the dog was put in the bottom of the bus with the luggage. They relented after police came.

When Orozco tried to board the return bus the next day, a Todays Bus employee in New York yanked his ticket away and tried to return his money, he says.

The bus pulled away. After Orozco called police, workers said he could take the next bus but ordered him to sit in the back. He complied, but he is filing a complaint with the Justice Department, which enforces the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). Todays Bus did not respond to four telephone messages left for the manager and owner.

The ADA guarantees interstate service to disabled passengers; that includes providing access, with advance notice, to people in wheelchairs. But many of the companies that pick up passengers curbside -- the so-called "Chinatown buses" -- simply ignore the law. In 2004, regulators checked 14 companies that operate between Washington and New York, and cited 11 of them for violating the ADA. The Justice Department launched an investigation in October 2004. "We continue to work on it," spokeswoman Cynthia Magnuson said last week.

Gathering evidence seems quick and easy to CoGo, who recently called Todays to ask about wheelchair access. The man who answered refused to give his name, but his answer was clear: "No wheelchair."

To register a complaint, call the Justice Department, 800-514- 0301.

Source: The Washington Post

Outraged? Email or call Todays Bus

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