Why Disability Rights Activists Stormed Mitch McConnell's Office
As Senate Republicans rolled out the Better Care Reconciliation Act, their health care reform proposal, on Thursday, the halls outside the office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were starting to get a little crowded. Sixty disability rights activists from grassroots group ADAPT, many of whom were using wheelchairs, staged a "die-in" to protest steep Medicaid cuts in the bill. They were arrested and removed by Capitol Police, with witnesses saying that some protesters were dropped by police officers dragging them from their chairs.
Bruce Darling, an ADAPT organizer who participated in the die-in, tells Rolling Stone the group took less than a week to coordinate. "It's truly un-American that the Republicans in Congress are trying to steal from disabled Americans to give to wealthy people," he says, describing the impetus behind the protest.
While ADAPT may not be widely known outside the disability community, the group has been fighting for disability autonomy since the 1970s, representing the 20 percent of the U.S. population that lives with a disability. The 43-year-old organization has engaged in thousands of direct actions like this one across the country. In Washington alone this year, protesters were arrested outside the White House in May and dragged from the Capitol Rotunda in March at the behest of House Majority Leader Paul Ryan (R-WI).
This protest comes with high stakes: Both the House and Senate "Trumpcare" bills propose radical changes to the American health care landscape that would hit disabled Americans first, and hardest. Some of the deepest cuts are to Medicaid, the entitlement program developed in 1965 to provide health coverage to low-income Americans. The Affordable Care Act allowed states to opt in to an expansion that brought more Americans into state Medicaid programs, and both the American Health Care Act (AHCA) and BCRA threaten to roll back that expansion.
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