For Immediate Release

The Long Road Home III
For more information contact:
Zen Garcia at (678)770-1225
Kate Gainer at (404-)687-8890 x 115

Georgia Disability Advocates plan this year’s Olmstead celebration around three areas of tremendous need - 1) the Children’s Freedom Initiative, 2) Money Follows the Person, and 3) a Starvation Dehydration Prevention Act to protect people with disabilities from that nightmare scenario that Terri Schiavo was forced to endure. 

The Children’s Freedom Initiative

Families are being reunited with their children as Georgia implements the Children's Freedom Initiative.  This program came about as a joint venture of the Georgia Advocacy Office, the Governor's Council on Developmental Disabilities, and the Institute on Human Development and Disability at the University of Georgia.  The program aims to free virtually all children with mental retardation and other developmental disabilities currently confined in Georgia institutions. 

This year, state lawmakers set aside 45 Medicaid waivers for developmentally disabled children, to help provide them with community services. These waivers allow Medicaid money intended for institutional care to be redirected to community and home services. 

State officials confirm that Georgia which has 5,800 emotionally disturbed or disabled children in state institutions lags grossly behind the national average when it comes to providing community-based mental health services for children.  The average cost to keep these children in state run institutions is anywhere from $100-$300 dollars a day.  State officials admonish that it is “cheaper in the long run to care for these children at home, as it relieves the state of facility and staffing costs.”

Money Follows the Person

 Too often people with disabilities of all ages, wind up having to go to a nursing home or other institution because either no one informed them about community based support services, or the waiting lists were too long for them to receive services in the community.  However, by listening to people with disabilities, the government has finally figured out how to provide community services without additional constraint to the budget.   The money that pays for a person's services in the nursing home or other institution can instead be used to pay for services in the community, hence the name Money Follows the Person.

 In 2007, under the federal Money Follows the Person initiative, states can apply to CMS (the federal Medicaid agency) to receive a better federal match (FMAP) for this initiative.  Over the course of the next five years, about 40 states will be selected to receive a better federal match (FMAP).  Using Money Follows the Person, for the first year a person moves out onto community services the federal government will cover a higher percent of the cost of their services and states will pay a smaller portion.  After that first year the match rate will return to the regular rate, but even this can save the state money.

Georgia ADAPT wants to alert our Governor and challenge him to take full advantage of this initiative and apply with CMS as soon as possible so that our state can reap the rewards of a better matching federal rate. According to the first quarter analysis of the Minimum Data Set, a quarterly questionnaire asked of all current nursing home residents, 5,774 people want to return to the community in this State alone.

 Starvation/Dehydration Prevention Act

This year marked the first anniversary of the judicial murder of Terri Schindler Schiavo.  Advocates across the nation were horrified at the treatment our nation forced Terri to endure.  Georgia ADAPT wants to protect people with disabilities in this state and across the nation from such a similar scenario unfolding here.  We have been instrumental in working with Senator Nancy Schaefer, who just a few months back introduced SR. 1067 - A Resolution creating a Senate Study Committee on the Prevention of the Starvation and Dehydration of Persons with Disabilities. 

We would like to follow-up this next legislative season with legislation to protect Georgians with disabilities from ever having to endure such cruel and inhumane treatment such as starvation/dehydration.  There is an increasing movement among the bioethicists in our nation to expand ‘back-door’ euthanasia practices in our nation’s hospitals, hospices, nursing homes, and institutions as not only a way to remove the medically expensive, but also as a way of increasing the population of people which can be harvested for their organs.

The bioethics movement in our country threatens the lives of all Americans especially those born pre-mature, disabled, or medically fragile.  They seem determined to kill many classes of individuals against our own will.  This is why it is imperative that Georgia become the second state in our nation to protect people from the bioethics agenda. 

Georgia ADAPT is holding a press conference at the Underground on June 22, 2006, to discuss all of the relevant issues facing our communities.  For information on how you can join us for the Long Road Home III, go to: http://www.lgtinc.org/authors/12/Kate-Gainer,  call Kate at 404-687-8890 x 115 or email her at ngainer@msn.com.