For Information Contact;
Randy Alexander (901) 359-4982
Marsha Katz (406) 544-9504
http://www.adapt.org
50 Arrested as ADAPT Takes Affordable, Accessible Housing Crisis to
Congress
Washington, D.C.--- ADAPT activists fanned out on the Hill today to hit
congressional leaders who can help solve the housing crisis for low
income people with disabilities. Visits to the offices of Rep. Barney
Frank (D, MA), a longtime leader on housing issues, and Senators Chris
Dodd (D, CT) and Richard Shelby (R, AL), the Chair and ranking Member of
the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs resulted in a
total of 50 arrests.
"Last year Rep. Barney Frank told us that he could get 500 housing
vouchers from HUD that would be targeted to free people with disabilities
who live in nursing homes and other institutions, " said Diane Coleman of
ADAPT in Rochester, New York. "He repeated that promise for months, and
then one day he suddenly says he can't help us. We were also working with
him to have funding that pays for segregated housing redirected to support
integrated housing. Sen. Frank arranged a hearing on this funding, and not
only did he not invite any people with disabilities to testify, he didn't
even notify us about the hearing. So, today, we decided to confront him on
his broken promises and bad faith."
Shortly after 13 ADAPT members entered Frank's office, he ordered staff to
have them arrested, refusing to even discuss the ADAPT concerns, or
strategies to address the housing crisis for low income people with
disabilities trapped in institutions for lack of affordable, accessible,
integrated housing.
ADAPT went to the offices of Dodd and Shelby because HUD and housing fall under the purview of their committee. Sen. Shelby told ADAPT, "I don't
help people who can't help themselves." There were 19 arrests made in
Shelby's office. An aide to Sen. Dodd spoke with ADAPT, then declined to
put her remarks on paper after indicating she might be willing to do so.
ADAPT continued to wait for the written statement, and eventually nearly
25 people were arrested.
"The TV is full of news about the bank crisis, and the mortgage crisis,
and the need for candidates to appeal to middle income people," said
Cassie James, Philadelphia ADAPT organizer. "Meanwhile, people who live
on disability benefits, and people who are trapped in nursing homes
because of no housing are being held hostage while the government bails
everyone else out. Rent has gone up so much, it's higher than many monthly
disability benefits. Not only do us younger people with disabilities need
affordable, accessible housing, older people need it, too. This is a
crisis, and we need help to solve it."
# # #
FOR MORE INFORMATION on ADAPT visit our website at http://www.adapt. org/
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( 3.2 / 47 )September 03, 2008
Presidential Campaign Websites Fail Accessibility & Usability Tests
According to assessments by The International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet (ICDRI) the campaign web sites for all Presidential have not made their web sites accessible to and usable by people with disabilities. All the presidential candidates’ websites were reviewed, including for John McCain, Barack Obama, Bob Barr, Alan Keyes and Ralph Nader. The accessibility assessments evaluated how easy it is for persons with disabilities and older Americans to make contributions, access information about the candidates’ positions, and engage as volunteers in the national campaigns.
ICDRI conducted free electronic reviews of John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s websites and sent these to the campaign managers notifying them of multiple inaccessibility concerns. The assessments found that Obama’s website is missing labels in the Form Fields which can confuse users of assistive technology and prevents persons with disabilities from knowing what to type into the input fields. Similarly, McCain’s web site has missing Alt Attribute tags, meaning that users of assistive technology will not be able to tell what message the image or object is trying to convey. ICDRI’s website has copies of the reports for all five candidates. See at
http://www.icdri.org/WebAccess/Pres08/P ... alPR08.htm
~Item provided by AAPD’s Technology Policy Initiative Director, Jenifer Simpson, an Advisory Board member to ICDRI.
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( 2.7 / 44 )I loved being at the Open pre Arthur Ashe stadium. Ticket prices were reasonable. Now I am happy to watch it at home, saving money and the aggravation of fighting with the "disabled" patron in his Hummer vying for the "handicap" spot. Enough of that!
Kudos to the newest ballgirl at the Open. I'll be looking for her! read the entire article at the NY Times site.
By JOSHUA ROBINSON NYT 8/28/08
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/29/sport ... lgirl.html
After every few dashes across Court 14, Kelly Bruno reached down to her right leg and flicked at something. It was a gesture so slight and so fleeting, she could have been swatting away a bug. It was also the only thing she did that was not in the protocol for a United States Open ball girl — nowhere does it mention popping the pressure valve on a prosthetic leg.
Bruno was born with several defects in her right leg and has been an amputee since she was 6 months old. By 18, she had turned herself into a track star among disabled athletes, with her own sponsorship deals. And as a world-class triathlete and Ironman competitor, she has raced in some of the most grueling events on the planet.
Now, at age 24, Bruno has scaled back her training for three weeks to shuttle back and forth across a courts at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center to scoop up balls at the net. In a job done correctly only by those who are barely noticed, Bruno has stood out by blending in.
“It’s definitely harder than I expected,” she said, flashing an easy smile. “For me the running is not as tiresome, but I didn’t think standing was going to be so exhausting.”.....
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( 3.1 / 57 )Report Rejects Medicare Boast of Paring Fraud
By CHARLES DUHIGG http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/busin ... amp;emc=th
Medicare’s top officials said in 2006 that they had reduced the number of fraudulent and improper claims paid by the agency, keeping billions of dollars out of the hands of people trying to game the system.
But according to a confidential draft of a federal inspector general’s report, those claims of success, which earned Medicare wide praise from lawmakers, were misleading.
In calculating the agency’s rate of improper payments, Medicare officials told outside auditors to ignore government policies that would have accurately measured fraud, according to the report. For example, auditors were told not to compare invoices from salespeople against doctors’ records, as required by law, to make sure that medical equipment went to actual patients.
As a result, Medicare did not detect that more than one-third of spending for wheelchairs, oxygen supplies and other medical equipment in its 2006 fiscal year was improper, according to the report. Based on data in other Medicare reports, that would be about $2.8 billion in improper spending.
That same year, Medicare officials told Congress that they had succeeded in driving down the cost of fraud in medical equipment to $700 million.
Some lawmakers and Congressional staff members say the irregularities that the inspector general found were tantamount to corruption and raise broader questions about the credibility of other Medicare figures.
“This is outrageous,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, who has repeatedly credited the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services with reducing improper expenditures. “If heads don’t roll, you can’t change the culture of this organization,” he added.
Senator Grassley had not yet received the full report from the inspector general but had been briefed on its contents.
The report — a draft of which was obtained by The New York Times — will probably be made public within the next week, according to federal officials. The inspector general may change or edit the findings of the report before it is officially released. Congressional staff said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — the agency overseeing Medicare — was lobbying the inspector to play down the report’s conclusions.
A spokesman for Medicare said that the agency agreed with the inspector general that the agency’s reported level of improper billing for durable medical equipment, or D.M.E., should have been higher. But Medicare says the $2.8 billion figure is unsupported.
“Allegations of manipulation of this error rate are preposterous,” said the spokesman, Jeff Nelligan. “The agency has aggressively targeted fraud and improper payments in the D.M.E. program. We have a history of working closely with the inspector general and will continue to do so.”
A representative of the Office of Inspector General that created the report — part of Medicare’s parent, the Department of Health and Human Services — said it did not comment on draft reports.
Fraudulent and improper payments have long bedeviled Medicare, a $466 billion program. In particular, payments for durable medical equipment, like power wheelchairs and diabetic test kits, are ripe for fraud.
Equipment sellers have submitted counterfeit documents, forged doctors’ signatures and filed claims on behalf of patients who were dead or had never been seen by the prescribing physician, according to many reports by government oversight agencies.
For example, a Florida businessman was sentenced last year to 37 months in prison for submitting more than $5.5 million of fake claims to Medicare. The businessman operated for months, despite giving the agency an address that was actually a utility closet.
On July 1, Medicare instituted a new competitive bidding system that officials said would reduce both fraud and costs for medical equipment.
On July 15, however, Congress suspended the program, after equipment manufacturers and sellers began an aggressive lobbying campaign.
Senator Grassley said Congress might push for an investigation into the private company that was hired to fulfill Medicare’s auditing program, the AdvanceMed Corporation, a division of the Computer Sciences Corporation. The report mentions AdvanceMed by name.
Representatives of AdvanceMed did not return calls. The company has received contracts worth more than $34 million from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services since 2005.
“This report doesn’t surprise me,” said Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California and a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee. He has pushed to cut improper Medicare spending. “To look better to the public, you cook the books,” he said. “This agency is incompetent.”
The Office of Inspector General’s report details scrutiny of a program known as Comprehensive Error Rate Testing, or CERT, that audits a sample of Medicare claims submitted by sellers of durable medical equipment. That program is supposed to randomly choose claims and review the medical records and other documents supporting submitted claims to determine whether payment is justified.
According to the inspector general’s report, officials at Medicare instructed AdvanceMed to disregard those policies. Instead, AdvanceMed was told to examine only the documents submitted by the companies selling the medical equipment, rather than verify those documents against physicians’ records.
Medicare reported to Congress that, for the fiscal year of 2006, AdvanceMed’s investigations had found that only 7.5 percent of claims paid by Medicare were not supported by appropriate documentation. But the inspector general’s review indicated that the actual error rate was closer to 31.5 percent.
For instance, according to the report, the Office of Inspector General examined a claim for an electric wheelchair that AdvanceMed had said was appropriate. The inspector general’s investigation revealed that the physician who was listed as having prescribed the wheelchair had no knowledge of the prescription.
The person who received the wheelchair said that he had never met with the physician, that he did not need a wheelchair and that he had never used it, according to the report. His wife had also received a wheelchair that she had not asked for and never used.
Equipment sellers can pocket more than $2,500 every time they send a powered wheelchair to a patient and bill Medicare.
“This is like letting the fox guard the henhouse,” said Malcolm Sparrow, a Harvard University professor who focuses on health care fraud. “The supplier has an incentive to supply fabricated documents or to imply that medical records support a purchase when they don’t. If you don’t ask the physician or ask for medical records, you can’t really verify anything.”
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( 3.2 / 41 )August 15, 2008
Issue: Call the Governor--Don' t Cut Funding to Independent Living Centers and Home Care!
Background: Despite the fact that Independent Living Centers and home care are critical services for the disability community in New York State , Governor Paterson has proposed serious cuts to these vital, cost-effective services.
The Governor has proposed immediately cutting Independent Living Centers by 6% on "remaining disbursements" this year. His proposal then carries over this cut into FY 2009 and beyond. These Centers were already cut by 2% this year so this cut would be on top of the original cut to ILC funding in the enacted FY 2008 state budget. That means the Governor has proposed reducing on-going Center funding by 8%!
The Governor is proposing to cut home care by eliminating the "trend factor" and cutting an additional 1% from reimbursement rates. Because this year's home care rates are based on actual expenses from two years ago, the trend factor is critical to adjusting these rates for the increased cost of doing business, including attendant wages and benefits. These cuts will significantly affect the ability of home care agencies to pay for wage increases and handle the ever-increasing cost of providing benefits, including health insurance, potentially forcing good attendants to look for other work.
Action:
1. CALL the Governor TODAY!! Tell him that you want the cuts to Independent Living Centers and Home Care stopped.
The number is: 518-474-8390
2. If you haven't already sent a fax, please do that as well. Here's the link: http://capwiz. com/rochestercdr /issues/alert/ ?alertid= 11797711&type=ML&show_alert=1
Although we are only calling the Gov, the capwiz fax contacts your legislators as well. It's important that they ALL hear from us.
3. SPREAD THE WORD and ask other people to call and fax! If we want to preserve funding for home care and Independent Living Centers we REALLY need to turn up the pressure. We need to get as many calls and faxes in as we can.
Please report your efforts by emailing Mgodino@bcid. org
If you have any questions about this work alert, please contact Mike Godino at 718-998-3000 or mgodino@bcid. org
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