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 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 communitybased 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.”
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