In this startling autobiographical story William Bronston, the activist physician whose early professional California training steels him with a deep moral, professional and cultural bond to the huge 6000 person disabled population he encountered who were incarcerated in Willowbrook State School in State Island, NY, and on whose behalf he daily battled to humanize and ultimately organize a winning Federal Class Action Lawsuit against the state to close the institution that caused early, inevitable and horrifying deaths.
Prior to the expose of Willowbrook, no small individualized community living arrangements existed across New York state in lieu of the 60 massive, Medicaid funded institutions that incarcerated the ‘different’ population imposed on their stricken families. Having been closed to admission by public scandal and impossible overcrowding, families were blackmailed to have their dependent member submit to secret viral medical research whose impact was completely unknown, where rampant disease, gruesome sanitation, lack of adequate food, clothing, carloads of tranquilizing medicine and the most minimal care and supervision manifested into a brutal norm.
Ultimately, because of Dr. Bronston’s heroic efforts, concerned parents, honest workers, top child development leaders in the field, local and national media were organized to expose and address the bureaucratic evil and ubiquitous violence that dominated the wretched lives inside.
This passionate book documents the immense drama of the public mobilization, media expose and Federal judicial process Bronston helped catalyze, that forged the path to what ultimately becomes the legal conviction for this systemic human abuse and Justice Ruth Ginsburg’s subsequent, monumental Supreme Court Olmstead Decision that framed the rightful foundation for nationwide transitional deinstitutionalized reform.
Dr. Bronston draws the clear line to indict the self-serving State bureaucracy and the strategic rationale to end Title 19 of the Social Security Act, the Medicaid system, in order to heal the deep societal wound that the nursing and assisted living industry, the segregated norm, that poses our universal paradigmatic terminus.
America has a documented history of enlightened politics that has transformed the lives of all people which reached a zenith in the late 1960s and 1970s leading to the Americans with Disabilities Act. However, the devalued and stigmatized populations of labeled people including Mental Retardation, Cerebral palsy, Autism, Epilepsy, Polio, sensory loss, neuromuscular degenerative conditions still prevails. Jabbing equally to the left and to the right wings, Dr. Bronston shows how both parties are now failing the test of a free and compassionate democracy, of government by for all people.
Public Hostages, who now age to become society’s elders, are now consigned to profit driven, segregated and congregate institutional lives funded by Medicaid’s billions. Thus an artificially created domestic “different” population, torn from every community and devastating America’s families has become an accepted paradigm that Dr. Bronston’s story intimately charts and passionately indicts.
Solution to Course Correct:
The ever-present and increasing barbarity of our existing corporate and privatized medical market system must be replaced by a true population-based health care system, a single-payer system, that is the heart of Dr. Bronston’s opening and closing chapters.
Calling on all concerned citizens and the civil and human rights community, Dr. Bronston urges us all to vigorously work to halt the institutionalized corporate greed of the pharmaceutical and insurance companies. Universal expansion and improved Medicare for all, single payer health care as the clear solution and ultimate antidote to this crime against humanity that we should no longer tolerate.