ACTION IN D.C.

ADAPT Gets Results in Washington

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More than 500 Washington, D.C., offices were visited by the nearly 500 ADAPT activists from across the country who left information on the Community Choice Act (CCA) of 2007 (S 799, H.R. 1621) with every senator and representative in Congress early in May.

ADAPT also presented each of them with a short DVD edited from hours of testimony from the March 2006 national hearing in Tennessee on the institutional bias in America’s long-term care systems. While distributing these items, ADAPT received many commitments from legislators to co-sponsor the bill and to push for hearings in both Houses.

By the end of the day, ADAPT had been notified by the staff of Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, that both committees would hold hearings on CCA before the end of the year.

“Along with the hearings, we have full support of CCA from the Democratic National Committee, and the Republican National Committee has committed to contact all its state affiliates to address the removal of the Medicaid institutional bias in their state platforms,” said Bob Liston of ADAPT in Montana ADAPT was able to secure a meeting with the American Hospital Association (AHA) after they had taken over the building that houses the AHA. ADAPT demanded that AHA endorse CCA, put ADAPT on the agenda of the next AHA conference and work with ADAPT to develop a hospital discharge protocol that will steer people into community services, not institutional services.

ADAPT also met with Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Alphonso Jackson in their Washington, D.C., hotel, and by the end of the meeting, he made a number of commitments. Jackson carried the ADAPT message to Congress the next day, where he testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee.

“Fair housing is a right,” said Jackson. “We will do everything in our power to make sure you have affordable, accessible, integrated housing options in this country.”

Among Jackson’s commitments was the promise to recover housing vouchers lost to people with disabilities (PWD) through misappropriation and budget cuts. He agreed to eliminate the high level of discrimination in housing against PWD.

He plans to facilitate a meeting between ADAPT and Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chair of the House Committee on Financial Services, and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), chair of the Financial Services Committee’s Sub-Committee on Housing and Community Opportunity. These committees are responsible for legislation affecting the Section 811 segregated housing program for PWD. ADAPT is calling for a restructuring of the Sec. 811 housing program to provide affordable, accessible, integrated housing, as well as increase the number of vouchers available to PWD.

Jackson plans to work with ADAPT on its Access Across America Program, which would provide housing vouchers to PWD. He also promised to meet with ADAPT three times a year. “ADAPT is pleased that Secretary Jackson came to us,” said Cassie James of Philadelphia ADAPT. “His own personal experience with discrimination gives him a window into the unconscionable discrimination in obtaining affordable, accessible, integrated housing that is experienced by people with disabilities all over America.

Earlier in the week, 99 arrests occurred when ADAPT invaded the Rayburn House Office Building to push for hearings on CCA by the House Energy and Commerce Committee Subcommittee on Health. ADAPT took over the hearing room, the offices of Reps. John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) and filled the horseshoe drive outside the Rayburn front door.

Tennessee in order to get the assistance that would keep me out of a nursing home,” said Dawn Russell of ADAPT in Colorado. “I want so much to be able to go home to Tennessee to be with my family, but I can’t, because then I’d be forced into a nursing home just because I need personal assistance to get through my day, and Tennessee refuses to provide that assistance to people in their own homes. I won’t give up my freedom, my privacy, my dignity and the control over my life, so I have to stay in exile in Colorado.”

The CCA was introduced in March 2007, and is the newest version of legislation that would allow Medicaid to pay for the services people need to remain in their own homes. Currently under Medicaid, states are federally mandated to provide only nursing home services and are not equally mandated to provide similar services in a person’s own home.

“Our work this week accomplished even more than we hoped,” said Bob Kafka, ADAPT national organizer. “But we still have so far to go. We are cautiously optimistic and committed to keeping this week’s momentum going through our next national action in September in Chicago, right up to the 2008 elections and beyond. We will push as hard as needed, for as long as needed until that situation is rectified.”