Information for those interested....
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2006 11:45:35 -0700
From: Liz Arjun <Liz@...>
Subject: Citizenship lawsuit

________________________________

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

SUIT CHALLENGES NEW LAW REQUIRING OVER 50 MILLION

PEOPLE IN MEDICAID TO DOCUMENT CITIZENSHIP

The Challenged Law Would Cause Millions of U.S. Citizens Who Can't
Produce Passports or Birth Certificates to Lose Health Coverage Starting
July 1

People Affected Include Low-Income Seniors in Nursing Homes, People with
Mental or Physical Disabilities, and Disaster Victims

A lawsuit filed today in Federal District Court in Chicago challenges
the validity of a new law that requires 50 million Medicaid recipients
to prove their citizenship with passports, birth certificates, and other
special documents or lose their public health coverage. The new law goes
into effect on July 1 and may cause millions of low-income U.S. citizens
to become uninsured.

The class action suit names Mike Leavitt, the Secretary of Health and
Human Services, as defendant. It seeks to declare the new law
unconstitutional and to enjoin the Administration from implementing it.

"Under the new law, American citizens are about to have their health
coverage denied for unconstitutional reasons," said John Bouman of the
Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, one of the attorneys for
the plaintiffs. "The new law will cause enormous harm to people who
can't produce the special documents, even though there is no doubt that
they are American citizens."

Among the named plaintiffs in the suit is Eddie Mae Binion, 72, of St.
Louis, Missouri. Ms. Binion was given away as a small child and raised
by a great grandmother in Mississippi. She has no living relatives, and
no one knows where she was born. "I have several severe health
problems-I am on dialysis, and I was just released from the hospital
following several mini-strokes," Ms. Binion says in a sworn affidavit.
"I do not have the energy or the time to search any more for evidence
showing that I was born in the United States."

The people at greatest risk of losing Medicaid coverage due to their
inability to present passports, birth certificates, or other special
documents are seniors in nursing homes, people with mental or physical
disabilities, disaster victims, and people not born in hospitals
(sometimes due to racial discrimination, especially in the South) who
never had birth certificates.

By at least one estimate, approximately 3 to 5 million low-income
people are likely to be thrown out of Medicaid because of their
inability to produce the required documents. An unknown number of people
applying for Medicaid will have delays or not be able to get Medicaid at
all because they cannot provide these documents. Due to their low-income
status, these people are likely to join the growing ranks of the
uninsured.

For more than a decade, Medicaid eligibility has been limited to U.S.
citizens and legal immigrants residing in the country for at least five
years. Until the new law was passed as part of the Deficit Reduction Act
(DRA) this year, documentary proof of citizenship was required only of
people whose citizenship was in doubt. The DRA, however, changed that by
requiring Medicaid beneficiaries to provide special documentary proof of
their citizenship status. According to another attorney for the
plaintiffs, Sarah Somers, "this provision has the perverse effect of
unfairly penalizing vulnerable American citizens."

The burden of administering this new requirement, applicable to more
than 50 million current Medicaid beneficiaries and millions of others
who newly apply for the program, will be left to the states, even though
cash-strapped states will find the new costs burdensome. California and
Ohio state officials have already threatened that they can't comply with
the law, even though failure to do so may result in the withdrawal of
billions of federal Medicaid dollars from the states.

The plaintiffs' attorneys expect to seek an immediate hearing so that
the law can be prevented from going into effect.

-30-

Counsel of record for this case: John Bouman and Margaret Stapleton,
Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law; Mary Anderson and David
Morrison, Goldberg Kohn Bell Black Rosenbloom & Moritz, Ltd.; Sarah
Somers, National Health Law Program; Stephanie Altman and Tom Yates,
Health & Disability Advocates; and Gene Coffey, National Senior Citizens
Law Center.