Why Health Reform is vital for the neediest of the needy (tear ya up)

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For Immediate Release: October 11, 2009

For Information Contact:
Bruce Darling 585-370-6690, Rally Recap
Marsha Katz 406-544-9504

http://www.adapt.org

ADAPT Rally at King Center in Atlanta Sets Tone for Week of Olmstead
Direct Action

Atlanta, GA -- Today, for the first time in 43 years, Delores Bates
celebrated her birthday outside institutional walls.
http://twitpic.com/photos/NationalADAPT (7 from BOTTOM)

She turned 60 years old by speaking at the King Center surrounded by
500 ADAPT activists from Georgia and across the country who all sang
Happy Birthday and celebrated her freedom with her. The fact that
Georgia kept Delores institutionalized most of her life, in violation
of her civil rights, is one of the reasons ADAPT is in Atlanta this week.

"Bodie" is another reason ADAPT has returned to the city where it first
launched the fight to give people a choice to live in the community
instead of being forced into nursing facilities and institutions. Bodie
loves the outdoors and he has been waiting 52 years, since he was ten
years old, to be able to go outdoors without having to ask permission.
He has been moved from one institution to another without anyone ever so
much as consulting him. People keep promising him he will move to a house
in the community, yet 52 years later, Bodie still lives in an institution.

More than 500 people marched today from the CNN Center, past historic
Ebenezer Baptist Church, to the King Center for a civil rights rally.
Invited speaker Attorney General Eric Holder didn't show, but Delores and
Bodie did, and so did Lois Curtis and Sue Jamieson. Curtis is the
surviving named plaintiff in the historic Olmstead lawsuit where she and
Elaine Wilson sued the state of Georgia for the right to move from a state
hospital to live in the community. Sue Jamieson is the attorney who
represented Curtis and Wilson and won the landmark decision before the
U.S. Supreme Court where the court found that Georgias practice of
inappropriately institutionalizing people with disabilities who could live
in the community represented illegal segregation and discrimination.

"Ten years after the Olmstead decision, and twenty years after ADAPT first
launched the fight for older and disabled Americans to have a real choice
in where they receive their long-term services and supports, the state of
Georgia continues to thumb its nose at the law," Said Mark Johnson of
Georgia ADAPT. "The state has never adequately funded community services,
and is now cutting them, despite the promises made by Gov. Sonny Perdue
when he first took office. In fact, since the Governor first made those
promises, nursing home admissions of people under 65 have grown, not
decreased."

Like other states across the country, Georgia's failure to develop and
implement an action oriented Olmstead plan with goals and timelines to
reduce unnecessary segregation of older and disabled Georgians has left it
seriously out of compliance with both the Olmstead Supreme Court decision,
and the Americans with Disabilities Act. State differences in compliance
have presented the best argument for national legislation like the
Community Choice Act which would guarantee residents in every state the
right to choose to receive long-term services and supports in their own
homes and communities.

Startlingly, the King Center, an undeniable symbol of freedom, sits next
door to a nursing facility, a concrete reminder of lost years and lost
lives. At the conclusion of the rally, Lois Curtis led the crowd in a
chant as people gazed at the adjoining property, "Free our brothers, free
our sisters, free our people, now!" ADAPT will spend the coming week in
Atlanta working on exactly that.

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