MI-ADAPT left greater Lansing at around 10pm on Friday evening and drove straight through to DC, with the thought that we would be able to skip a lot of the traffic. This worked out OK. Kudos to our PA Luke, who drove the van through the night and got us there safe. On Saturday we settled into the hotel and met up with our friends from other chapters to get excited for the week. Sunday was the Fun Run, a fundraiser when ADAPTers take laps by foot or wheel around a park to help off set the costs of our actions. The evening brought pizza (just room service, I have been exhausted since our overnight drive) and a viewing of the original Charlie and The Chocolatre Factory.
Today we got a relatively low key start at 9am. We began with a visit to Attorney General Holder and the Department of Justice. We wanted to start a discussion about enforcing the Olmestead Supreme Court Decions in a time of financial crisis. In a way, the tone of ADAPT has shifted over the past couple of years since the financial crash.
In fall of 08, we staged a housing action because things looked so hopeful for the passage of the Community Choice Act that would require states to offer funding programs for community based homecare rather than just the entitlement to institionalized, nursing home care. In other words, people would be given a choice about how their medicaid money is spent and could live in the community with their friends and family rather than have every aspect of their personal lives controlled in a nursing home. Right now, some states have such measures in place, but the CCA would make it mandatory (http://www.passthecommunitychoiceact.org/). So, at the very beginning of the current economic depression, we began shifting focus toward housing policy so that accessible and affordable housing would be available to people leaving nursing homes. Housing is a serious issue. The fact that I live in a college dormitory at 28 years old is testament to how hard it is to find accessible housing at a decent price.
Just two years later, our key focus is purely defensive with the Defending Our Freedom campaign that is organized to try and stop the massacre of community based long term care programs as states cut their budgets. In other words, because the CCA is not yet law, states are required by law to provide nursing home care, but homecare is optional. In Kansas, a meals on wheels program is ending that costs 7$ a day, without any thought of of how this is likely to increase the long term costs as more and more people are not able to live independently and find themselves in nursing homes (many more than 7$ each day).
So we began with a demand that the DOJ start investigating cases where people are being institutionalized against their will, which is illegal based on an ADA ruling by the Supreme Court (the Olmstead decision in 2000). It rained but my chair somehow held up. The only real result of the weather is that I got to share an umbrella with a cute girl. We weren’t going to take the building and really escalate things and we didn’t need to. This hit was more of a reminder than a full on speaking of truth to power.
Next, we moved on to the National Governor’s Association, where we were also aiming to support folks on the state level trying to keep people out of nursing homes. This was a full on escalation where we took doors and were expecting arrests because of the conversations leading up to this week, which have been less than encouraging, apparently. Of course, it’s not surprising that it’s easy to say no to a few emails than it is to a crowd of 500 activists that have gained control of the entrances of your building. So it was again without arrests that we were able to get a promise that community choice options would be added to the Best Practices literature produced by the NGA and distributed to the states.
That’s all for now. I better sleep for a few hours before we have to line up at 5am for tomorrow’s adventure!!!
