Olmstead in New York -
When?
It is said that all good things are
worth the wait. If that's true, then New York State's Olmstead Plan is
guaranteed to be something spectacular!
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in
June 1999 against the state of Georgia in the case of Olmstead v. L.C., the
Olmstead decision, as it is now called, upheld the ADA's requirement for states
to provide home and community based services to people with disabilities,
saying that the unjustified institutionalization of people with disabilities
who need long term care is discriminatory. As a result of the ruling, the
Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) sent letters to each state
directing them to establish a plan to implement the Olmstead decision.
That was more than four years ago.
Since then, fewer than half the states have adopted an Olmstead Implementation
Plan. Among the good guys are Nevada, Maine, Indiana, Minnesota, Colorado,
Kansas, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, Vermont, New Hampshire, and
recently Virginia. Here in New York, Governor Pataki signed the Most Integrated
Setting (MIS) bill into law on September 17, 2002, the result of wholesale
pressure from disability advocates. The bill called for the creation of a Most
Integrated Setting Coordinating Council that would develop an Olmstead
Implementation Plan for New York within a year. And still, New York has no
Olmstead Plan.
Why? Well, some say that there is
foot dragging because once New York has an Olmstead Plan it can be sued for
violations of that plan. That may be. But, the National Council on Disability
in a recent report cited the "institutional bias" of Medicaid funds and the
shortage of affordable housing as the major impediments toward adaptation of
meaningful state Olmstead Plans.
Here in New York, the Department of
Health is responsible for managing both Medicaid's Home and Community Based
waivers that provide funding for services people with disabilities need in
order to live in their communities, as well as the very nursing homes that
imprison our people. How's that for internal conflict? In fact, even though
people with mental retardation and developmental disabilities and those with
traumatic
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