Disabled protesters besiege Tennessee state capitol

More than 400 disabled activists from 40 states and the District of Columbia recently staged five days of militant action in Nashville, the capital of Tennessee and a national headquarters of for-profit health care. Mobilized by Amer ican Disabled for Attendant Pro grams Today (ADAPT), they demanded an end to policies that force elderly and disabled people to go into nursing homes for services that they should be receiving in their own homes.

‘Our homes, not nursing homes.’ Photo: Tom Olin, ADAPT

On March 19, in front of media and fed eral officials, over 100 present and former residents of Tennessee nursing homes testified to the miserable and oppressive conditions they faced. “I swear to god it was like listening to people who just got out of prison,” recalled Chicago ADAPT organizer Ed Hoffmans. Being institutionalized in Tennessee is so bad, and services outside nursing homes are so impossible to get, that activists have had to create strategies to help disabled people escape to other states—a system they call the Under ground Railroad.

The next day, hundreds of protesters, many using wheelchairs, marched uphill in cold and wet weather to a rally at the War Memorial. They then blockaded several intersections around the Capitol building for over five hours, while also shutting down the exit from the parking garage. They chanted, “Just like a nursing home—you can’t get out!” Sixty were arrested.

On March 21 they returned to the Capitol, rallying across the street and chanting steadily for two and a half hours. A delegation attempted to meet with Gov. Phil Bre desen. After being rebuffed, they blockaded Charlotte Avenue. Police arrested 44 and threatened them with a month in jail and a $1,000 fine if they repeated their civil disobedience action.

On the following day they held a long march through the city to the office of TennCare, the state Medicaid program, and then to the office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. They chanted, “Free our brothers, free our sisters, free our people now!”

Bredesen, a Democrat, consistently refuses to meet with disability activists. He is not a servant of the ruling class—he is a member of it. He made his $100 million fortune in the health care industry, specifically the managed-care giants HealthAmerica and Coventry. Tennessee’s Repub lican senator, majority leader Bill Frist, likewise made his fortune from the Tennessee-based Hospital Corporation of America.

Bredesen is a great believer in corporate medicine but not public health care. In February 2005, he told a national conference that Medicaid has “more in common with ... socialist economy than the commonsense business principles that do such a good job allocating resour ces efficiently in other parts of our American life.”

Acting on these principles, he “solved” the budget problems of TennCare by throwing 330,000 poor and uninsurable people off the rolls. In response, activists occupied Bredesen’s outer office from June 20 to Sept. 4, 2005. This 77-day sit-in is believed to be the longest ever at a U.S. State Capitol building.

According to ADAPT sources, 77 percent of all Medi caid funds in the U.S. are earmarked for nursing home care, meaning they mostly go to private businesses, leaving less than a quarter for home-based services. But in Tennessee the figure is 99 percent.

Contrary to the myth about capitalist “efficiency,” home-based services would not only liberate the recipients but cost less per person. But they would mean less profit for the corporations, which view nursing homes as a gold mine, given the growing number of people who need assistive care due to disability or age.

Protesters called for the Tennessee legislature to pass the Community Choices Act, which would allow Medicaid funds to be paid to community providers of the recipient’s choice.

More information, including photos and video clips, is available at www.adapt.org/freeourpeople/aar/nash06/.