Banned from Bingo

Ann Clinton loves playing bingo, but her retirement community won’t let her join her friends to play the game since she moved from an independent living apartment to the skilled nursing floor of the Redstone Village Continuing Care Retirement Community in Huntsville, Alabama. She has been excluded from bingo, which takes place on the independent living floor, because she is disabled. The reasons cited by Redstone Village have to do with enforcement of arbitrary policies that forbid residents from leaving the nursing floor unaccompanied. Ms. Clinton has Parkinson’s and now uses a motorized scooter for mobility. In 2012, Ms. Clinton and her husband, who is now deceased, paid a deposit of $351,424 plus $4,600 a month to live in a facility that promised to provide for their needs as they aged. Being banned from bingo, therefore, must surely feel like a horrible betrayal.

While CCRC’s arbitrary and inflexible policies are inexcusable, what troubles me even more than the company’s discriminatory rules is the attitudes and behavior of the residents in the independent living section of the facility. They no longer want Ms. Clinton to play bingo with them, apparently because she now has a mobility device and requires the additional help provided on the skilled nursing floor. In essence, they have rejected Ms. Clinton because she has a significant disability. Their own prejudice against people with disabilities, and their fears about aging and increased impairment are at the heart of this betrayal. I wonder: What if they, too, become disabled? Have they really not thought about how they would like others to treat them if they became less mobile as they age? Is their denial and fear that strong? I would have hoped and expected them to champion her cause, not turn against her, knowing that they themselves might one day soon have to deal with the same discriminatory system.

This is not an isolated case. There have been other accounts of this form of discriminatory action occurring in CCRCs around the country. I was glad to read that Ms. Clinton’s son is planning on filing a lawsuit. The AARP and the National Senior Citizens Law Center think that the policies of this CCRC violate the federal Fair Housing Act, which outlaws discrimination based on disability, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, which mandates accommodations, including policy modifications, for people with disabilities. As a member of the board of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, I applaud this action.