DAY SEVENTY-TWO: Frist dodges the difficult problems.

(Boulder, August 30, 2005) As a heart surgeon closely associated with the mammoth healthcare corporation HCA, Senator Bill Frist seems uniquely qualified to recommend solutions to the TennCare crises. Because the lion share of Medicaid funds are federal dollars matching state money, it seems the representatives in Washington DC would take a particular interest in healthcare in Tennessee, but the Senate Majority Leader has remained quiet about the problem in his home state.

Toney Garr, the Executive Director of the Tennessee Healthcare Campaign, who has been following TennCare closely for years, says that Senator Bill Frist “is silent on this issue.”

“It takes an action to pull out a feeding tube,” said Frist on the Senate floor, referring to the healthcare of Florida resident Terri Schiavo. “It takes an action to stop feeding. The inaction of feeding becomes an action.”

Frist’s inaction on the TennCare crisis was highlighted by Tennessee ADAPT this past Saturday, when activists visited his office and the Senator responded with more silence. ADAPT has asked Frist to co-sponsor Medicaid reform legislation that will end the stranglehold that the Nursing Home industry has on state and federal Medicaid funds.

US states that participate in the federal Medicaid program must provide institutional long-term care, or nursing homes. When the Medicaid legislation was adopted nearly forty years ago people with disabilities had no long-term support and nursing homes were a benefit. Since the ADA people with disabilities have educated the nation on a unique form of discrimination: institutionalization. The ADA describes discrimination that have separated and isolated people with disabilities from American life and opportunities.

The nursing home industry that has developed over the past forty years is intent on resisting the independence of people with disabilities. In Tennessee the powerful nursing home lobby is the forth-largest organization at providing political gifts and nursing homes are located in every county in Tennessee. The lion share of nursing home profits are from public funding sources, even though nursing homes are the most expensive and least desired form of long-term care.

Tennessee’s nursing home lobby has been successful at limiting cost-saving alternatives to institutional care to keep the public funds flowing into their pockets. Other US states have produced waivers of the institutional requirement to ask the federal government to provide Medicaid long-term care funding for home and community services to help people with disabilities remain in their own home and avoid expensive institutionalization.

Frist could take a leading role in this legislation nationally and assist his home state in cutting the state Medicaid costs. ADAPT and people with disabilities are demanding an end to the institutional bias, not because it is less expensive but because it is the necessary next step in the civil rights progression of humans.

- Tim Wheat