Monthly Archives: February 2010

Equal Rights Are Not a Budget Item

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Bigotry never trumps freedom and freedom is not possible without equal rights.

And so it is that people with disabilities are being told having equal rights depends on the economy, thus relegating them to a budget item.

ADAPT, the country’s most prestigious disability rights organization in this writer’s view, has  launched a Defending Our Freedom campaign to address the carnage being inflicted on the lives of people with disabilities. Across this country state budget cuts are forcing people with disabilities, as well as seniors, back into nursing homes, all this in direct violation of the 11-year-old  United States Supreme Court Olmstead Decision which says Americans with disabilities have the right to live in the most integrated settings.

The Kahrmann Consumer Advocacy Coalition (KCAC)  completely supports the ADAPT campaign.  The KCAC will be seeking to address one of the symptoms of this attack on the rights of people with disabilities when members of its leadership team meet Friday with Mark Kissinger, a deputy commissioner in the New York State Department of Health, and his staff. The state’s DOH has recently issued a directive to providers of services to people with brain injuries living in the community that, if it stands as is, will likely send back into nursing homes and put others at risk.

The survivors themselves have sued the state to stop the carnage.

It is appropriate that this piece is being written on the birthday of Rosa Parks, an extraordinary woman who refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery Alabama and, with that single act of defiance, sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott which led to the end of segregation on the buses and brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence.

Treating any minority, whether it be people with disabilities, people who are Gay or Lesbian, people who are black, Hispanic, Jewish,  Muslim, and so on as if they are less than human, is not only illegal, it is a foolish strategy. Why? Because the bigotry that blinds people to the humanity of others  leads them to underestimate the will and resourcefulness of the very people they are dehumanizing.

We are born with equal rights. They are not something we need to earn or be given as a line item in a budget.

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Brain Injury Survivors Sue New York State

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The Courthouse News Service today reports that “Hundreds of people with traumatic brain injuries may be forced out of their community living facilities and placed in institutions, due to a new provision in the state’s Medicaid program, according to a federal class action.”

The survivors, represented by Robert W. Lukow of Legal Services of Central New York, in Syracuse, say “the state Department of Health is violating the Constitution and the Medicaid Act by abruptly transferring scores of "waiver" participants to different service providers, without adequate notice and without ensuring that services will continue”.  The content of the lawsuit itself is powerful.

This writer has heard from waiver providers and survivors who are reeling from the impact of the DOH directive. Moreover, as one who lives with a brain injury and one who has worked with people with brain injuries for 15 years, I know firsthand how devastating change can be, especially change that has entirely ignored your voice.

One of the through lines of trauma is loss of control. Whether it is a gunshot wound to the head (my experience) or a car accident, death of a loved one, stroke, fall, loss of job or relationship, loss of control is a brutalizing and merciless factor.

New York State has a lot to be proud of by bringing the Home and Community Based Services Medicaid Waiver for brain injury survivors online 1995. However, inflicting directives on those survivors against their will, when it damages their quality of life and more, inflicts yet another trauma by removing all control from the survivors, is nothing at all to be proud of.

The DOH directive inflicting this carnage on the lives of survivors violates the very philosophy DOH claims it stands by in its waiver manual: “The philosophy of the waiver supports the participants right to choose where to live, who to live with, and what goals and activities to choose.” The DOH “philosophy” goes on to say, “The individual is the primary decision maker” and the waiver “leads to personal empowerment, increased independence, greater community inclusion, self-reliance and meaningful productive activities.”

Survivors, their loved ones as well as those providing those services have a right to expect those words to be more than lip service. After all, if the current directive holds, some survivors will be forced back into institutions and others looking to leave institutions will find themselves trapped.

Denying freedom is not what the waiver or this country is about.

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