PR Newswire, 6 December 1996.

"We've never gone this far before. But now we're asking Executive Directors to step up to the plate and join with the people they serve in committing civil disobedience," said Hochendoner. "We have already done everything else we can do to stop this medically negligent plan from going forward. The state's callous indifference leaves us with no alternative but to put our bodies on the line. HealthChoices, if implemented as it now stands, will kill people through neglect and incompetence. My colleagues and I are risking arrest on Tuesday to help federal officials understand that how profoundly damaging it would be for them to give the state the go-ahead on HealthChoices," he continued.

The December 10 action against HealthChoices will start at 2 PM at the federal Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) offices at 35th and Market Streets in Philadelphia. Expected to attract hundreds of participants, it will address the incapacity of HealthChoices to serve both the 13,000 Delaware Valley residents with HIV who will be forced to enroll and hundreds of thousands more who are elderly, disabled or medically vulnerable for other reasons.

"HCFA can decline approval of Pennsylvania's HealthChoices waiver application," Hochendoner explained. "We're appealing to them to do exactly what they did in New York last year," he added, noting that New York had planned to implement a similarly inadequate Medicaid managed care plan in 1995. HCFA evaluated New York's plan as likely to jeopardize the health of people with HIV/AIDS and other severe, chronic health conditions. As a result, the state suspended mandatory enrollment of such individuals and is now creating a comprehensive Special Needs plan to assure the adequacy of its Medicaid managed care system.

Hochendoner noted that the Consortium has actively participated for months in a broad advocacy coalition known as the Ad Hoc Working Group on HealthChoices. "Through the Working Group, we've done everything we can to promote meaningful, outcomes-based dialog on this. We understand that managed care is the trend of the future and we honestly believe that the deficiencies in HealthChoices can be quantified, corrected and a good managed care system developed. Consortium staff have invested a lot of hours in looking at the Medicaid managed care systems serving people with HIV/AIDS in Massachusetts, Maryland and other places where it's being done right," Hochendoner added. "We've made our expertise freely available and tried hard to work with the Department. But I have to say that the Department has basically refused to make a good-faith effort to work with the community," he said.

The final straw, Hochendoner noted, came in the form of documents sent by the Department of Welfare to the HealthChoices Working Group last Wednesday when Welfare official Peg Dierkers, with 90-minutes notice, canceled a scheduled meeting with fifty Working Group members. In lieu of attending, Dierkers faxed documents to the meeting, one of which was a report responding to the Working Group's survey on the dearth of HIV-experienced physicians available to HealthChoices enrollees.

"Peg's response was just blatantly inaccurate and misleading," Hochendoner said. "For example, the report stated that 29 HIV-experienced physicians are available to HealthChoices enrollees living in Chester County. This was after the Department agreed to count using a definition of 'HIV-experienced provider' that the physicians in our Working Group developed. There's no way on earth that there are 29 physicians in Chester County who can meet our definition (which, among other criteria, included having cared for at least 50 people with HIV/AIDS to date). So why is the Department responding on life-and-death problems with data that is patently and obviously inaccurate? When I read that, I understood that I had an obligation to put my body on the line and risk arrest rather than let this plan go through," Hochendoner concluded.

Hochendoner added that this kind of advocacy is completely consistent with the Philadelphia AIDS Consortium's mission. "We're the only HIV/AIDS- specific, system-wide advocacy coalition in the region," he said. "What could possibly be a higher priority for us than using every resource at our disposal to advocate for decent care, services and civil rights for people with HIV/AIDS?"

The Consortium funds 67 agencies and organizations across the region. Hochendoner and Cronauer issued a call yesterday to the Executive Directors of all those agencies to join with them in risking arrest on December 10. "The AIDS services system cannot tolerate the imposition of HealthChoices as it now stands on the people with HIV and AIDS to whom we are accountable. We must, therefore, challenge HCFA to either stop HealthChoices or arrest the system," he concluded.

CONTACT: Anna Forbes of Philadelphia AIDS Consortium, 610-649-8113 or fax, 610-649-4261/ 19:35 EST

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