When I woke up on Thursday morning, I didn’t expect a picture of me in handcuffs to wind up all over the internet. I’ve been an activist with the Disability Rights group ADAPT for 10 years. When we learned that the Senate planned to vote on a bill that included $800 billion in Medicaid cuts, we knew that we needed to take action quickly. Our months of trying to talk with legislators did not work. We needed to do something more drastic.

In less than a week we organized 60 activists, most of whom are disabled themselves, to hold a “die-in” at Mitch McConnell’s office. The die-in — where protestors physically disrupt a space by laying down their bodies to simulate corpses — represented the harm that the bill would do to so many disabled people. I traveled from Rochester, New York, to join in.

Medicaid is important to disabled people. We raise our voice and get answered with handcuffs #ADAPTandRESIST pic.twitter.com/Wm00OG4JYI — Colleen Flanagan (@ColleenFlangan) June 22, 2017

We poured into Mitch McConnell’s office and the hallway outside of his door at 11 am. We got out of our wheelchairs and onto the ground while chanting “No cuts to Medicaid! Save our liberty!”

We were told to leave, or we’d be arrested. I was eventually handcuffed. I was taken into custody and charged with incommoding, or obstructing, a public space. The entire time, I passively resisted — I did nothing to insult or instigate the cops, but I refused to comply with the police’s orders to get out of the office.

A horrific metaphor for Trumpcare: this disabled woman literally being ripped from her wheelchair. #StopTrumpcare pic.twitter.com/F5kmz8rnCv — Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) June 22, 2017

I wasn’t going anywhere. When it comes to matters of life or death for both me and many other disabled Americans who depend on Medicaid, the threat of arrests will not deter us. After all, we’d rather go to jail than die without Medicaid.

It’s no exaggeration — I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Medicaid

I was born a disabled child with spina bifida into a working-class family with Republican ideals. My father quickly learned that no amount of pulling on his bootstraps would get his disabled child health care coverage.

I needed countless surgeries, medications, and wheelchairs to keep me alive and independent. I had more than 15 surgeries on my spine, legs, and feet before I turned 10. I still have an affinity for hospital food because I ate it more often than I ate home cooked meals. It is no exaggeration when I say that my family depended on Medicaid to keep me alive. I was a Medicaid recipient until I graduated from law school when I was 25 and got a job with private insurance. I would not be here today if it wasn’t for Medicaid.

My passion for helping other people in my community led me to devote my life’s work to helping people with disabilities. I am now an attorney, and my work focuses on the legal end of helping disabled people get access to health care, public accommodations, and better quality of life and independence by helping them get out of institutions and into the community.

My activism began when I was 19 and I started working for the Center for Disability Rights as an intern. This is when I learned about ADAPT, a national grassroots community that organizes Disability Rights activists to engage in nonviolent direct action, including civil disobedience, to assure the civil and human rights of people with disabilities to live in freedom. I joined ADAPT because it helped me to realize that my voice as a disabled woman matters. It also showed me that there are many tools activists can use to create change.

In fact, ADAPT has taught me that protesting is not the first step, it is the last step. For every direct action that the group has organized, there is months, if not years, of groundwork that has lead up to it. We meet with legislators, we write policy, we try to work with administrations, and when we are ignored we demonstrate.

Two months into joining ADAPT, I was asked to go to Albany for a demonstration in the governor’s office regarding funding cuts to home and community based services for disabled people. I went. I chanted. I fought for the rights of my brothers and sisters with disabilities to live in freedom. I fought against the institutional bias. When I asked what “institutional bias” meant, the explanation was simple: “People just like you are forced into nursing homes just because they need help with things like showering or transferring to their wheelchairs. They’re forced there because Medicaid will pay for nursing homes, but won’t always pay for people to get help in their own homes.”

McConnell’s Senate health care bill will take away our lives and liberty

The Senate’s bill would gash Medicaid by more than $800 billion dollars.

This is devastating to people with disabilities. Medicaid covers 30 percent of all adults with disabilities and 60 percent of all children with disabilities. The things that Medicaid covers for disabled people go beyond the medication and assistive devices, such as our wheelchairs and crutches, that keep us alive and active. Medicaid also covers 51 percent of all long-term services and supports including a broad range of assistance with medical and personal care, such as eating, dressing, showering, cooking, medication management, and housework.

Our health care system isn’t perfect. Many people with disabilities are forced to go to nursing facilities right now because there are waiting lists for Medicaid to pay for their community-based services. But the Senate bill would make our system and our lives so much worse. Under federal law, Medicaid is required to pay for nursing facility services, but paying for services in the home and community is optional, even though it is often cheaper and it is generally where people with disabilities and seniors want to live. With the significant Medicaid caps and cuts that the Senate bill includes, this means that home and community based services will be cut first — again, even though they’re cheaper — because these services are optional.

In terms of real people, this means that not only are our medications and wheelchairs at risk, but our lives and our liberty are, too. Many disabled Americans who rely on community-based services would either die or be forced into nursing facilities and other institutions just to get the services and supports they need to live.

We’d rather go to jail than die without Medicaid

When I say live, I don’t just mean to continue breathing, though many of my friends and millions of Americans do depend on Medicaid to simply stay alive. When I say live, I mean to truly live. To live in the community, to work, to raise a family, to have cats and eat a ridiculous amount of pizza rolls and cheeseburgers like I like to do. I mean to live an ordinary life. I mean to live in freedom.

Because the liberty of so many Americans with disabilities is at stake, we laid our bodies on the line last week. We chanted loudly as we were taken away from the office and into police custody.

After I was taken out of the Senate Russell building, I was plopped on the sidewalk and cuffed. Then I got back into my wheelchair and was placed on a Capitol Police bus to go to the station for processing. I was held in a room with at least 25 other wheelchair users, while the other ADAPT members were held in another room. We were held for approximately 10 hours in a building with no accessible women’s facilities. The officers told me I would be charged with incommoding, but not having access to a bathroom for hours was a far worse punishment than the $50 fine I was finally slapped with.

Our protest in Mitch McConnell’s office is not the last protest in this fight. It cannot be the last. Together, we must all take the streets. We must demand a health care system that aligns with our core American values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.

We would rather go to jail than die without Medicaid.

Stephanie Woodward is the director of advocacy at the Center for Disability Rights in Rochester, New York, and an organizer with ADAPT. She is a proud disabled person and cat lady. When she is not fighting for Disability Rights, Stephanie can be found eating cheeseburgers and playing with her four cats.

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