Freedom
Clearinghouse Advocates Make Power Moves
Three updates as of
3/08/00
One update from
3/11/00
One
STOP
THE PRESSES!
update from 4/29/00
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Cartoon showing a bureaucrat sitting at his desk, eyeing
a shark fin making its way toward him across the liquid-appearing desktop.
The shark's fin has Olmstead written on it.
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Missouri
Feds on white horses charge
into state meeting
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Jefferson City,
Missouri -- February 4, 2000
by Candace Hawkins
The
room was already packed with feds and advocates when I arrived early
for the meeting [on Missouri's compliance with the Supreme Court's
Olmstead ruling.] A total of 75 attended in a room with capacity
for 50.
State
agency folks -- the ones who are expected to follow this plan -- were
scarce. But heavy-hitting feds were all over it. John Halverson, Region
VII manager of the HHS Office of Civil Rights, and three staffers attended.
HHS OCR's Director, Tom Perez, sent special counsel Sheila Foran and Claudia
Schlossberg out from DC.
Foran
set the tone for the meeting: we were there to implement Olmstead.
The representative from Missouri Medicaid later made reference to the
[puny] waiver, but avoided details.
The
feds walked us through what's required in Olmstead state plans.
We listed everyone not in attendance who needed to be there. State agency
folks slipped out to make furtive calls at the lunch break. Agencies in
the hot seat -- state hospitals, habilitation centers and Division on
Aging -- lined up to use the phones.
Curiously,
many of those agency reps did not return after lunch as the group got
busy identifying issues and organizing to formulate a plan. Two state
legislators reminded the crowd that we need allies in the General Assembly
to assure that Olmstead implementation is funded and state impediments
removed. Our deadline is July 26, 2000.
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Region
VII
Montana advocates file
Olmstead complaint vs. sheltered workshop
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from reporting by
Joe Ehman
Three
times since January the Region VII Health and Human Services Office
of Civil Rights has met with a coalition of advocates from Freedom Clearinghouse,
ADAPT, the Arc and others at the Atlantis CIL in Denver. Groups from other
states in the region came in to join us, too.
HHS-OCR
acting manager Velveta Howell, until recently a litigator for that office,
gave us a summary of complaints which have been filed by our advocates
in the region. One class complaint has come from Utah, another from Colorado,
five from Montana including two class complaints that the state segregates
people in sheltered workshops and day programs instead of funding community-based
services.
Day-programming
segregation amounts to what Howell calls "discrimination by states based
on funding decisions."
So
yes, Olmstead applies not just to residential "care," but to all state
programs. Repeat: all.
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National
Web
Clearinghouse website offers
new power tools
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New
pages on the Clearinghouse website allow advocates to print out an
official HHS Office of Civil Rights Complaint form, plus a copy of the
HHS regulation which requires any facility receiving government funds
to allow individual advocates or advocacy "entities" access to those facilities
so as to meet with, and advocate for, inmates there. We've had this power
for a long time, but who knew?
For
a state-by-state list of advocates who've signed up [it's updated
almost daily] add /network/advocates.htm to the web address
of http://www.freedomclearinghouse.com.
So
far, only Maine, Nebraska, South Dakota, South Carolina, and Vermont are
unrepresented on the advocate list. Among the territories, only American
Samoa is unrepresented.
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Update March
11
Clearinghouse website offers
new state plan blueprint
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Mary
Johnson, editor of Ragged Edge Magazine has written a blueprint
for state plans to get into compliance with the Supreme Court's Olmstead
decision.
Candace
Hawkins has written a step-by-step
how-to for advocates to get their states going. That will be up on
the Freedom Clearinghouse website probably by the time you read this.
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STOP
THE PRESSES!
Update April
28
Missouri legislature says
"Long-term care money must follow the
person."
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Candace
Hawkins, an advocate for her own state of Missouri, told us today
that the Missouri State Legislature did not appropriate the expected $74
million in the state's long-term care funding to "follow the person" --
they appropriated more. Counting the federal match, between
$650 and $725 million will be free to follow the person from institutions
to real life in the community.
As
of July 1 of this year, every citizen of the state will have the right
to choose the setting where they receive long-term care services. This
is the first such state-wide compliance with the Supreme Court's Olmstead
ruling. "One down, forty-nine to go," Hawkins said.
We
estimate that 53,576 people will now have the right to choose where
they live. The state inspects 78,500 beds in residences (nursing home,
group home, ICF-M R, mental hospital and personal care home) and the majority
are Medicaid funded. For
more on this story, including how we arrived at our estimate, click here.
Kirsten
Dunham, advocate for Paraquad Independent Living Center in St. Louis,
took part in an April 27 press conference at the state capital where she
urged the state's departments to "take immediate steps to identify individuals
in institutions who can move to the community using existing services
and to give people choices before they have to enter an institution."
As
the legislators noted, the state does not yet have a mechanism in place
to locate people who wish to live in freedom, or to accommodate their
wish to do so.
The
AARP Missouri chapter was present in force at the press conference, putting
their considerable support behind the legislators who pushed this bill
through. Representative Quincy Troupe of St. Louis and State Senator Joe
Maxwell of Mexico, Missouri, took the lead in this legislative battle.
Until
now, 78 percent of Missouri's long-term care dollars were paid to isolate
its disabled citizens in nursing homes and other institutions. In its
historic Olmstead decision, the U.S. Supreme Court called that "unjustifiable
isolation... properly regarded as discrimination."
NOTE TO READERS:
Candace began her work with the Ad Hoc Coaltion right after
Christmas. It can be done -- and done
quickly.
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Joe Ehman, who wrote the Region VIII update,
also wrote "Contaminated Smile" for this
issue.
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