Archive for the ‘medicaid’ tag
Advocacy Center Hosts Medicaid Waiver Training Seminar
The Advocacy Center will be sponsoring a Seminar on Representing Persons
with Disabilities in Medicaid Waiver Determination Hearings. The
seminar will be held from 12:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m., on Wednesday, March
11, 2009, at 1000 N. Ashley Drive, Suite 640, Tampa, Florida 33602.
The seminar will include an overview of how to represent persons with
disabilities who have challenged a denial or change in services by APD.
Many of these individuals will need lawyers to assist them through the
proceedings before the Division of Administrative Hearings. Since
September of 2008 thousands of individuals have had their level of
service changed and many are still without counsel to represent them.
The Advocacy Center is willing to provide technical assistance and
consultation to any attorney choosing to handle a case pro bono.
There is no fee to attend this seminar, and those wishing to attend, are
requested to contact Rhonda Orlosky, at rhondao@advocacycenter.org or by
calling 813-233-2920, ext. 209.
Medicaid Recipients can leave HMO for good cause
More good news for victims of so-called Medicaid reform.
Medicaid HMO patients will be allowed to drop out of their health plans and switch their care to other doctors under a pair of administrative and legal actions recently approved by the state. Medicaid HMO patients will be told that they can leave their health plan if their doctors aren’t in the network of the managed care organization or if their care is poor, denied or unreasonably delayed, among other things…
“As the state moves more and more to managed care, these rights become more critical,” said Florida Legal Services attorney Miriam Harmatz, lead counsel on the class-action suit filed a year ago in Fort Lauderdale…
Harmatz represented David Reed, David Mitchell and Joann Brown, three Medicaid recipients who filed a class action suit last year on behalf of the 200,000 Medicaid beneficiaries enrolled in the Medicaid Reform counties. The suit alleged that AHCA violated their rights and federal law by failing to let them know they could leave their managed-care plan at any time if they had a good reason.
AHCA tried unsuccessfully to dismiss the case. On Nov. 20, the agency signed a settlement agreement with Florida Legal Services and Broward Legal Aid.
Medicaid Reform Ailing
When disadvantaged residents of Duval and Broward counties unwittingly found themselves as pilots in the project to “reform” Medicaid, they were understandably wary. Two and a half years into the pilot project, we now know that their fears have been more than justified. First, there are the horror stories:
- Robin Eckman, of Broward County, says she went into diabetic shock and nearly died in 2007 after the plan denied her a certain type of insulin she’d been using for years…
- Annie Youngblood, a Duval County diabetic, was in a plan that didn’t have any endocrinologists in network. While waiting for an appointment with an out-of-network specialist, she suffered a stroke…
- A study by Florida Legal Services showed three of 14 plans didn’t have an online directory, as required by reform. Those that were posted listed many doctors who couldn’t be reached or weren’t taking new patients. Almost half of the endocrinologists or diabetes specialists reached weren’t taking new patients.
And it’s not just the poor patients who are having trouble with the so-called reform measure. Doctors and HMOs are even calling it quits.
According to records obtained by The Associated Press, the number of participating primary care providers in Duval and Broward counties has dropped about 25 percent, from 4,250 to 3,253, in the past 11/2 years. And the pilot’s largest private provider has admitted stealing money from the state in other programs.