adapt
22 Mar 2006Inconvenienced by the protests on Monday and Tuesday? Adapt, dammit. I made a post over at metblogs tonight which I hope can serve as somewhat of a rebuttal to claims of annoyance or inconvenience over the protests, both innocent, and deplorable. While I stuck to the specifics of what actually went down in Nashville over there, I did link to this post, which gives a great higher-level run-down of what ADAPT is all about, including this bit, which I’d like to quote, because this is important, and it’s fairly well written:
When Medicaid was developed in 1965, the law required that for a state to receive funds for long-term care through Medicaid, that state had to have facilities to care for the disabled. At that time it was assumed that people with disabilities were incapable of living anywhere other than in institutions or nursing homes, but with the movement to dispel the stereotype of the helpless and dependent disabled person and the passage of legislation like the ADA that has made America much more accessible, it is now much more feasible for elderly and disabled Americans to remain in their own homes and communities. Things have changed, but Medicaid has not changed with them. Care in institutional settings is still fully funded by a federal mandate, but funds that would allow people to receive the same nursing or attendant care in their own homes are entirely optional. That means that individual states can whether they will provide waivers for community-based care and how much care they will fund. This explains discrepancies in the level of community-based care between states (it is easier to receive in-home support in Michigan than in Illinois, for example). The fact that Medicaid will fully fund care in a nursing home or institution but not in one’s own home or community is commonly referred to as the institutional bias, and it is this bias that ADAPT has been fighting to eliminate since 1990.
Now you know why they were out there.