ADAPT takes on DC #street action!

For Immediate Release

September 20, 2011


Contact:

Janine Bertram (503)622-6387
Bruce Darling (585) 370-6690
Marsha Katz (406) 544-9504


ADAPT DEMANDS SUPER COMMITTEE'S REPUBLICAN SENATORS STEP UP ON MEDICAID
REFORM

Washington, DC --- Building on protests yesterday at the White House and
the Congressional offices of Republican Representatives Jeb Hensarling
(R-Texas) and Dave Camp (R-Michigan), the national disability rights group
ADAPT is now at the Senate offices in the U.S. Capitol, demanding that two
Super Committee Senators, Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) and Patrick J. Toomey
(R-Pennsylvania) work with them to ensure that Medicaid dollars are
invested in cost-savingcommunity supports.  54 ADAPT activists were
arrested at the offices of Rep. Hensarling and Rep. Camp yesterday; 30
remained in custody as of mid-morning.

"People need to understand that reducing funds to the Medicaid system in
any way will result in providers closing and people losing services," said
Cassie James Holdsworth of Philadelphia ADAPT.  "President Obama said
yesterday that his proposed Medicaid will not result in loss of coverage
for people with disabilities and seniors.  But the fact is that even waste
reduction strategies such as privatized managed care result in major
disruption of services.  The Super Committee has to understand that we
need to get real about Medicaid.  Over the next decade, more and more
people will need it and we should be investing in cost saving services
like home and community based supports, and not just engage in slash and
burn cuts that willcost more in the long run."

"Community-based Medicaid services give us independence, health care, help
our families stay together, and provide jobs," said Tom Cagle of Ohio
ADAPT. "States have already made significant cuts to Medicaid. How many
more people with disabilities and seniors must lose our basic freedoms and
lives in order to have done our share?"

Lopeti Penimani, an ADAPT organizer from Phoenix, Arizona, pointed out
that states have already reduced or eliminated vital home care services
and forced seniors and people with disabilities into nursing facilities
against their will. "People are already experiencing reduced or eliminated
access to basic healthcare, including medications.  Jobs have already been
eliminated for home care and direct care workers."

ADAPT is demanding that the Senate Republicans on the Super Committee
agree to support the "millionaire's tax" assure that funding for Medicaid
is not capped and that it increases proportionate to need; eliminate
Medicaid's institutional bias as a part of the plan to address the
deficit; and provide ADAPT with an opportunity to testify before the
entire Super Committee regarding ADAPT's proposals for real Medicaid
reform and eliminating the institutional bias in the plan to address the
deficit.

Details of ADAPT's REAL Medicaid Reform proposals can be found on the
ADAPT website at http://www.adapt.org

###


ADAPT;S DEMANDS of the Republican Senate Members on the Super Committee

September 20, 2011

Congressional Republicans, including those on the Super Committee, believe
the burden of deficit reduction should only come from spending cuts to
critical programs, including Medicaid. They refuse to ask millionaires and
billionaires to pay their fair share to get our fiscal house in order and
reduce the deficit."

Fundamental questions need to be answered:

What is fair in such shared sacrifice?

Is a Medicaid home care recipient losing assistance with getting in and
out of bed and toileting the same as a hedge fund manager not being able
to buy yet another Ferrari?

Is a family who is forced to give up their disabled child because Medicaid
will no longer provide them with the supports they need the same as a
family who will now need to think twice about buying a luxury estate?

Is an elderly woman losing her home and family and being forced into a
nursing facility because she can no longer receive Medicaid attendant
services the same as an oil company not being able to write off the cost
of a private jet.

Is an attendant who just manages to make ends meet losing the income that
allows her to care for her family the same as a bank executive paying more
taxes on a multi-million dollar bonus?

ADAPT demands that the Congressional Senate Republicans on the Super
Committee agree to:


*  include a millionaire's tax in the deficit reduction plan toassure that
 Medicaid beneficiaries do not bear the burden of efforts to address the
 deficit;

*  maintain the integrity of the Medicaid program by assuring that the
 funding for Medicaid is not capped and increases proportionate to need;


*  eliminate Medicaid's institutional bias as a part of the plan to
 address the deficit; and

*  provide ADAPT with an opportunity to testify before the entire Super
 Committee regarding ADAPT's proposals for real Medicaid reform an
 deliminating the institutional bias in the plan to address the deficit.

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

LGBT & Handicapped Protest GOP Cuts and Anti-Gay Amendment

Video by Bill Sorem
St. Paul, MN, May 11, 2011. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual (LGBT) groups and Minnesota’s handicapped joined forces at the Minnesota State Senate session to protest the proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and a number of cuts to services as part of the GOP Cuts Only Budget.
The protest against the amendment was very emotional and principled, but the effort failed as the Senate passed the Constitutional Amendment by a vote of 38 to 27. It now goes to the House before it will be placed on the 2012 state ballot. There was no further action on social service cuts, but the senate session was interrupted by noisy acts of civil disobedience in the senate gallery. Four people were removed from the building, but none were arrested. See more : I’d Rather Go To Jail Than Die In A Nursing Home.

Disability Rights Group Briefly Shuts Down MN Senate

By Pat Kessler, WCCO-TV

ST. PAUL (WCCO) — With less than two weeks left before the end of the session at the Minnesota Capitol, the budget is still up in the air. On Wednesday, a small group of people with disabilities came to protest the fact that state senators have been talking about a gay marriage ban instead of dollars and cents.

Wearing red T-shirts and waving homemade posters, protesters from a disability rights group called ADAPT shouted at senators debating the gay marriage bill. 

Health care budget cuts, they say, will take away everything from their eyeglasses to their personal care attendants, and force some of them out of their homes into nursing homes.

The Senate president ordered the Sergeant at Arms and the State Patrol to forcibly remove the protesters, but it posed a problem: Some were blind and some paraplegic.

Members of the group were not arrested, but they were escorted from the building.

ADAPT has been known to use civil disobedience as a way to draw attention to their issues.

Disability Rights Activists Are Even Invisible Getting Arrested on Capitol Hill by Janine Jackson

Published on Monday, May 9, 2011 by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

Disability Rights Activists Are Even Invisible Getting Arrested on Capitol Hill

by Janine Jackson

Elite media’s selective disdain for public activism is well known. Still, you’d think some things would garner a word or two. Like 300 disability rights activists, a couple hundred in wheelchairs, occupying the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. The May 2 demonstration was organized by the rights group ADAPT to protest Republican budget plans for Medicaid. Ninety-one people were arrested and carted off by Capitol police.

Yet days after the rotunda protest, and another action the next day in which 300 demonstrators gathered outside the Longworth House Office Building, many getting inside to Rep. Paul Ryan's second floor office where 10 were arrested, the country's big media have taken no notice. Accounts in Politico (5/2/11) and the Hill (5/3/11) were all a search turned up.



ADAPT organizer Mike Ervin explained that it’s not just the roughly 35 percent funding cuts to Medicaid in the GOP’s budget proposal that concern the disability community, but the plan to convert states' federal shares into block grants. Many people with disabilities rely on Medicaid “for the assistance we get every day to live in our communities," rather than institutions.

As for the claim, from Ryan's Roadmap Plan, that block granting "allows states maximum flexibility to tailor their Medicaid programs to the specific needs of their populations," Ervin says, "That's like saying Jim Crow laws give states more flexibility to decide who gets to drink at their water fountains. Flexibility is basically a code word for abandonment."

People with disabilities (one community that anyone can join at any moment) and their advocates are right to worry their concerns won't be heard by lawmakers, to the extent that that involves dealing with a press corps that, evidently, can't even see them.

© 2011 FAIR

Janine Jackson is FAIR's program director and and producer/co-host of FAIR's syndicated radio show CounterSpin. She contributes frequently to FAIR's magazine, Extra!and co-edited The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the '90s (Westview Press).

Monday Reportback from ADAPT in Washington, DC

Washington, DC

• May 7th, 2011 7:57 pm ET

By Martina Robinson

Disability Examiner

On Monday, members of the nonviolent direct action group ADAPT which has launched a campaign called "Defending Our Freedom" took their message of no block grants in Medicaid to the Halls of Congress.  The group is in direct opposition to Senator Paul Ryan's plan to block grant Medicaid.  The Ryan proposal, activists feel, would reduce available services and force more people into institutions.

Activists were unusually quiet marching to the  Hill.  Not one chant was heard as marchers lined the hallways.  Even as activists moved into the Rotunda there was not a sound, accept for subdued chatter and whirring of wheelchair motors.  Then the energy of almost 300 activists was unleashed as rounds and rounds of "Free our brothers,  free our sisters, free our people now!" suddenly exploded through the Capitol.  The rotunda acoustics are amazing!  The Capitol police were stunned and moved in to arrest, but changed their minds when activists quieted down and ADAPT's leadership team went into negotiate.

Several members of Congress came to visit the activists while they were in the Rotunda and by 6:25 pm the negotiations had failed and police were moving in with the intent to arrest this time.  The last person to speak to activists was Representative John Lewis.  Representative Lewis was himself arrested with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the civil rights movement of the 1960's.

He told activists that there was no shame in going to jail to fight an injustice.  He said this just as activists, many of whom used wheelchairs, were being led away by police.  Some ADAPT members speculated that there would not have been so many arrest had Representative Lewis not spoken.  All and all, 91 members were arrested Monday.

The early arrestees could still make out the chants of "I'd rather go to jail then die in a nursing home!" through the ceiling of the hallway they were led down which was one floor below the Rotunda, from those still waiting to be arrested who were above them.


Mug shots were taken. Property was bagged.  If arrestees needed medicine, they had to ask an officer to retrieve it.  Battery chargers for wheelchairs were kept with individuals, however, and the police were prompt in bringing medicines when asked for.  Going to the bathroom was an issue.  Police are not trained in the provision of personal care assistance (PCA) services and at first were not even aware of where the wheelchair accessible bathroom was!  Fortunately, a few PCA's got arrested and the officers seemed to be a quick study.  Activists received water, half a sandwich, and in one case ice for a swollen ankle.

Among the arrested where Bobbi Wallach, who has been previously arrested for civil disobedience over the institutionalization issue. Ms. Wallach moved into her own apartment last month after 4 and a half years in a nursing home.  She says the home didn’t want to let her go because they claimed she required two people to lift her.  However, she credits the Center for Disability Rights located in Rochester for finding the loophole that allowed her to be evaluated by an independent service.  As a result, she was able to prove that she only needed one PCA at a time and move out.  Ms. Wallach says, “I’m in my own home and loving it.  I make my own decisions.  I have all my choices and all my rights back now.”

Another arrestee was Heiwa Salovitz who recently moved from Connecticut to Texas where he volunteers with ADAPT of Texas.  He hopes to get a job soon “helping real people gain their freedom.”

 The first release happened at 3:11AM Tuesday morning.  The last group was released at 6:30.  ADAPT members, arrested or not, are supposed to be lined up by 10AM Tuesday.  Those arrested are due in court on May 26th in Washington, DC.

Continue reading on Examiner.com: Monday Reportback from ADAPT in Washington, DC - National disability | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/disability-in-national/monday-reportback-from-adapt-washington-dc#ixzz1LpQGVbdh

Disabled Wis. protesters arrested outside Paul Ryan's DC office

Seeded on Fri May 6, 2011 11:23 AM EDTArticle Source: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

politics, republican, budget, protest, wisconsin, medicare, medicaid, disabled, paul-ryan

Seeded by American Idle

Washington - A group of Wisconsinites with disabilities vowed Wednesday to keep protesting the Ryan budget after many of them were arrested this week demonstrating in congressional office buildings.

"Representative Ryan is going to be seeing us again sooner or later. . . . We aren't going away," said Jerome Holzbauer, a retired Milwaukee schoolteacher who has cerebral palsy.
Holzbauer was arrested Monday with 90 others from Wisconsin and other states while protesting Ryan's proposal to convert the Medicaid entitlement into block grants to the states. The group had occupied the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building.

Another story:

Disability advocates take to Capitol Hill, demand rejection of Ryan budget plan

UPDATE: At about 6:30 p.m. EST, Capitol police began arresting ADAPT members who refused to leave the rotunda. The organization released a brief statement as the arrests began:

Tonight, Capitol Police have begun arresting ADAPT members from all over the country, who have remained in the Cannon House Office Building since midday. The ADAPTers want Representatives Paul Ryan, John Boehner and Michelle Bachmann to publicly withdraw their support for Medicaid budget cuts and Medicaid state block grants. Without this commitment, ADAPT has decided to make a point that we are willing to do whatever it takes to defend the right of people with disabilities and seniors to live in our homes, not nursing homes and institutions. It is unacceptable for our own government to treat the 60 million Americans who rely on Medicaid like garbage.

[A]about 100 people have been arrested so far, many of them chanting “I’d rather be in jail than in a nursing home!” He said Ryan sent his chief of staff to speak with the protesters but that Speaker of the House John Boehner refused to speak to the organization. Representatives who talked to the group and listened to their demands included: John Lewis (D-Ga.), Danny Davis (D-Ill.), Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), and Barney Frank (D-Mass.)